After shooting my final shoot for my film still, I had to choose the image I wanted to edit. The image above is the one I chose to edit. First off I cropped the image to the correct size as the original film still.
Next, I opened the photo in photoshop where I started off by trying to get the same colour, brightness and exposure etc as the original film still. For brightness I increased it and bought down the contrast to lighten image as it was quite dark compared to the film still, decreasing the contrast made the image less vibrant. As the original film still has a slight red and little bit of yellow tone to it I used the colour balance to add a slight red and yellow tone.
This is how the image transformed after I adjusted to brightness/contrast and the colour balance. Compared to the raw image this is a lot closer to my film still.
The next step I took was changing the colour of the eyes, for this I was unsure how to do it so I looked it up on google and found a tutorial I could follow. Here is the website I used:
https://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/eye-color/
First off I used the Lasso Tool to select the eyes, then used the Hue/Saturation to change to colour of the eyes to blue. However, this created a bright blue which wasn’t what I was looking for. Therefore I played around on photoshop using the exposure, channel mixer, brightness and contrast until I got the closest colour I could get to Mia’s eyes in the film still. As seen in the image below:
Another feature I wanted to adjust was Lauren’s eyebrows, as Lauren’s eyebrows are much darker than Uma’s in the film still. To do this I used a similar process to the way I edited the eyes. I used the Lasso Tool to select both the eyebrows, then used the exposure to make them lighter. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make them as light as Uma’s but I made them as light as I could before it looked unnatural.
When editing I noticed the fake blood I used in my shoot was a lot redder than the blood in the original film still, so I decided I wanted to change this. Similarly, to the eyes and the eyebrows, I used the same process the change this. I used the Lasso Tool to carefully select the blood. Next, I used the Hue and Saturation to make the blood more of a dark red/orange colour.
A few final touches I made was to the skin tone, the shape of the nose and to the hair. As Lauren’s skin tone is quite olive coloured I had to edit this to make more of a pale look, similar to Mia’s. To do this I selected all of Lauren’s skin and created a layer mask. I did this so I would only be adjusting the skin tone and not all of the photo. I used the brightness and contrast to make Lauren’s skin darker and pale and then I used curves to make the shadows a little brighter. The skin mask used levels out Lauren’s skin tone making it less vibrant and peachy.
One of the final adjustments I made was to Lauren’s nose. In the original film still, Mia has a petite skinny nose. To make Lauren’s nose smaller I used Liquify and the brush tool to make it smaller and skinnier. As seen in the images below you can how I used to Liquify tool to edit the nose.
One of the last adjustments I made was to the hair, as I used a wig it doesn’t have the same effect on camera as real hair. Unfortunately, there was little I could do to edit as the hair came out quite dark on the camera making it difficult to edit without it looking unrealistic or fake. What I could do was use the dodge tool to slightly lighten the hair so it didn’t blend into the background as much.
The very last thing I did was remove Lauren’s freckles on her face as Mia does not have any. To do this I used the spot healing brush tool. This left me with my final edit, as seen below:
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