This creative assignment consists of a series of 3 portraits unified by purpose, Capturing smiles of people on the street. For the images, I worked on improving composition, cropping, and applying special effects. The driving concept behind this series is to catch people smiling in everyday situations in order to create more happiness in the world. Smiles bring joy and catch us as human beings at our best. And smiles are contagious.

For this project/campaign, I used several of the Photoshop techniques learned in this course to enhance the portraits in an attempt to showcase the smiles. I unified the series by applying similar Photoshop effects to all of the portraits. However, due to the images being shot in different locations with different subjects and different lighting, I could not perform one set of adjustments across all the images.

First I started out by cropping these images to tighten in on the smiling faces, to emphasize the warmth of a smile. And, as our cropping lesson taught us, "The tighter the cropping, the bigger the drama- When you crop up-close and personal, it creates a bigger sense of drama and pulls a greater focus onto the detail of an object or person. For example, the closer you crop a face, the bigger the features get, which makes it easier for the audience to identify the emotion within that face." So the cropping component of this series was essential to the uniformity of the project.

Then I moved into adjustments.  In order to give these images the same look and feel, I wanted the adjustments to look similar. The challenge was that these images were shot in different locations, in different lighting.

So first, I adjusted the RGB curves levels to form an S curve for a cross-processing effect.

Then I adjusted the Hue/Saturation to +5 hue, 33 saturation, and +1 lightness. The only difference in initial adjustments between the images was for Portrait 2, the image was very light, and almost over processed, so here I dropped the lightness to -8. This removed a lot of the “shine” that the high resolution image was picking up.

Next, I promised these folks I would make them look good, so I went to my liquify filter to work on their faces. I felt Portrait 2 came out looking pretty good, so I did not do any facial adjustments on that image. For Portraits 1 & 3. I shrunk the jawline on both, and slightly elongated the forhead and chin height to give a slimming effect. I also very subtly dragged the smile slider over +5 or so to solidify the smile component of my “Frame a Smile” project.

Lastly, I added a warming layer mask to each image to, well, warm the image!

Once I got the images looking fairly uniform, I then saved as JPEG’s and opened them in Camera raw for easier minor adjustments. Here are the final tweaks to the images I made:

For each image,  I dropped the temperature -5, exposure to -.40.