Exercise 20: Improvement

This exercise is about making local adjustments to a part of an image in such a way that the rest of the image is left unaffected. For this, I chose an image of our son-in-law, Marv, before the London to Brighton bike ride in 2011. 




Original image

For the purpose of this exercise, I decided to increase the contrast in the image without changing the contrast of the background. I used the lasso tool in Photoshop and then created a curves adjustment to increase the contrast.


Adjusted image

The result is a little too contrasty but, for the purpose of the exercise, shows how a local area i.e. a figure, can be altered in isolation.


What do I think of this type of adjustment? To some extent it depends on the subject, as there could be cases where features may be darkened for less than innocent purposes but, generally, the adjustments in this category seem to me to be quite legitimate and quite creative effects can be achieved.