1. In order to adjust the levels of light and contrast within my image, I first use the 'levels' tool and drag the arrows across the bottom of the grid further towards the middle. This made the dark portions of my image darker, whilst still bringing more vibrance and light into the lighter toned areas (for example, her face).
2. To intensify the contrast in the image, I use the brightness/contrast tool. Bringing up both the brightness and the contrast created a large amount of contrast and exposure in the photo, however this is the effect that I wanted to create as this would make the tones in the image very extreme when I turned it to black and white.
3. To make my image black and white, I used the Black & White tool under the adjustments tab as this tool would allow me to control the depth of tone with each colour. In order to keep the high amount of contrast that I had, I brought the red down (this deepened areas such as her hair and her lipstick) and brought the yellow up (this brightened her face). I also adjust the blue and cyan levels slightly as this helped to darken her leather jacket, whilst keeping some specks of light there for depth.
4. In order to create the grainy effect that I wanted, I used the 'Add Noise...' tool and brought the level of noise up slightly. This added small specks of colour all clustered together all over the image. Whilst this helped with the grainy effect that I wanted, I did not want it to be too obvious and I felt that this was quite stark against the black and white image.
5. In order to dull down the noise that I added and make it appear more natural on the image, I decided to use a gaussian blur. By adding this, it diffused each pixel of noise and created the effect of grain that I wanted as opposed to noise. Not only this, but by adding a gaussian blur I was able to soften the whole image and make it less sharp. This was something that I wanted to do as images from the 1950s were not that sharp due to the under-developed technology used.
6. Lastly, I decided to add a vignette to the image. Whilst the image as a whole was quite dark in tone and there was enough attention on the girls face anyway, I felt that I wanted to add a vignette due to her jacket. Towards the bottom of the image, I felt that there was too much light visible on her jacket and I wanted to create more depth here. So, using the curve and gradient tools, I added a vignette.
Original Image:
Final Image:
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