For this week’s blog assignment we were tasked with presenting a food graphic in the spirit of Steve Hansen who was our guest speaker for this week.
I chose to take myself out to my local restaurant Ba Bar which is a hip neo-Vietnamese place and order their Phở Dặc Biệt to photograph and prepare in Adobe Photoshop.
I took the photo in diffuse natural lighting by being sat near a window on an overcast day at lunch. Typical Seattle weather. And the photograph came out wonderfully, in my opinion, even though I’m not a trained photographer. I don’t have a camera other than the one on my phone, so I used it. It would definitely not be satisfactory for an actual print application because it’s a low quality phone camera, but all things considered, I think it works for the web.
I then brought the image into photoshop and added one curves adjustment layer and manipulated each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels to bring out the colors of the food. I had to consider the greens in the herbs floating atop the soup, and the deep red of the soup and sauce. I focused on making those colors pop. Then, I felt that there was too much green brought out in the image overall, so I added another photo filter adjustment layer to bring out more red in the whole photo to try and balance it. Honestly, I don’t really know what I’m doing in photoshop, but I tried to apply some of the concepts we’ve been learning in our color class. In retrospect, I should have masked out the parts in the curves layer that didn’t contain the color I wanted to bring out.
Here’s the final photo:
