Alright, so here’s my own project for the week: me trying to figure out photoshop again, and ending up with this by (happy) accident.

I took this picture and was trying to figure out how to improve it – I wanted to try to mess with the focus of it, and make the person in the foreground a little sharper. I came at this whole thing with no tutorial and remembering little to nothing about how to use photoshop. I ended up doing this by using “work paths” instead of (instead of…?) layers, in a way. I selected the person in the foreground and was able to sharpen some aspects of the photo, but had trouble adjusting it so that it would be sharp enough without looking fake. In order to contrast this, I blurred the background more by deselecting that “work path” and then applying my changes to the rest of the photo. I also fooled around with the brightness, contrast, saturation, etc., and ended up making the foreground person black & white because, with the added sharpness and blurred background, he almost looked “photoshopped in,” and I thought that it would be interesting to b&w him to see how much it would stand out. To me it now looks like he actually was just randomly placed in the photo, which I kind of like, because isn’t the exact opposite of the point of photoshop?