A how to on examining and fixing issues with framing, coloring, brightness and composition
By breljoset
Creating a digital painting or artwork of any kind relies on good usage of composition, coloring, lighting and framing. In this blog, I will discuss the importance of these aspects of an image and how you can change them for free with out credit cost using Budgetpixels Design Studio tools. Composition: Your composition should be clear, concise, and not difficult to visually read. The subject should be discernible with out being buried by other details. The interaction of other objects within the composition should make sense and be equally as discernible as your main subject. Coloring: Coloring should be balanced but also draw your focus to your main subject. Some times colors can be washed out, some times there can be a color grading or a color "mask" like a mist is hanging over your whole image giving it a very particular tint. You'll want to balance out those kind of awkward colorations. Lighting: You want to make sure lighting is interesting and as dramatic as necessary but also not so dark that your subject cannot be seen or the details buried. This can be an issue for LCD screens, TV's and smart phones where the colors and lightness of an image can be made worse by what angle you are viewing your screen from. Having too dark of an image exacerbates this problem. Framing: You want to frame your subject in a way that makes the most sense, generally that means the subject is in the middle and in focus. Additionally, the environment, colors, lighting and composition all work in tandem to draw one's focus toward the subject, toward an action, or a particular emotion you want your audience to feel. As a rule of thumb, you have your action progressing toward the right side of your screen (that is somewhat a composition issue than framing). We'll use one of my own generations as an example. For an older Budgetpixel challenge, we were tasked with creating our own interesting take on a the "snake charmer" concept. Being interested in silly wordplay and turning a concept upside down on itself, why not take the snake charmer and make them the snake? The snake charmer is charming the man using an apple as a call back to the biblical tale of Adam and Eve being offered an apple in the Garden of Eden. But there are a number of glaring issues! As much as I enjoyed this work, disappointingly, it did not have much success in the voting rounds. So I took a harder look at my piece and asked myself, what could have been done better? Going by the general guidelines I laid out, there are a number of issues this piece struggles with which I will go over. At the time of the challenge, previewing the full size of a submission piece took a considerable amount of time because the preview function was not as streamlined as it was now, most likely people were not examining the full image and instead going off of the previews alone. We will be adjusting our image so it has more bite and more focus in preview mode. We will be using Budgetpixel's Design Studio to alter our image. Once we're in the studio we upload the image we want to work on. Click on the upload icon and select your piece. Our workspace is now ready-Almost!!! You're probably thinking to yourself "I can see my work, and I see a bunch of tools, but it is hard to see my work, it's zoomed out a lot!" Ironically it's the same preview issue we had during the voting challenges! This can be addressed. Many photo editing programs use the same keyboard shortcuts to navigate with, much like how you use ctrl+c and ctrl+v, many of these shortcuts are universal across programs, apps and platforms. Budgetpixel's Design Studio is the same. To zoom in on your image, press ctrl and the + key. To zoom out, use ctrl and - key. Additionally, you can hold the ctrl key and use your mouse wheel to zoom in and zoom out. Next, you can adjust where it is you are zoomed into, hold the spacebar and then click to drag to where you want to focus. Now that we have a closer view of our work, the details are clear, the subject is legible, all of these qualities can be appreciated when viewed close but not all of our audience are going to take the time to view it in full size, so we will instead aim for making a better, more eye-catching preview that might compel them to vote for our piece. 1. Composition This composition has a striking snake character in the middle of a rustic and ornate closed off space adorned with many cultural artworks and antiquities. There is a contrast between the disheveled man and the naga (snake woman) who is adorned with lavish gold jewelry while wearing a green cloak with snake eyes on the hood and dangling fang ornaments by her eyes vs the man's plain and disheveled look. There is a sense that she has power over the man because she is standing up and towering over him in the composition versus the man's seated and passive position, signifying that he is the recipient of the action in this image, while the naga is the initiator of the action. Any changes to composition would require generating a new image or substantially altering the image, discussion of changing the composition will be left for another time, we will instead focus on the other guidelines. 2. Coloring & Lighting Both of these will handled in the same section because both are changed using the same tools. The image is very dark, so we will want to increase the brightness. We have increased the brightness with the slider to 114%, however the coloring looks very washed out. Next step we increase the contrast to 114% as well. This makes the darker colors much darker and lighter colors lighter. Now we increase the saturation also to 114% to make the colors richer and pop out more. All of these changes will make the image more vibrant and interesting vs the original. We can closely compare the effects of our changes, the original on the left, the adjustments on the right in this close up shot. 3. Framing Framing can be used to adjust our composition so that our subject is properly in the focus, or the background and actions of all objects in the image are properly defining our subject as the central point of focus. The original image can be thought to have extraneous area and unnecessary details, these are referred to as negative space. We want to reduce negative space as much as possible that doesn't contribute to the image, so we will use the cropping function. As a rule of thumb, modern smart phones, computer screens, and television screens, use a ratio of 16:9 as the standard. The other common ratio is 9:16 which is the prevailing length and width dimensions of social media sites such as Tiktok and Youtube Shorts. Your phone most likely records in the dimensions of a ratio of 9:16 or 16:9 if you rotate your phone on its side. So we will maximize how much of our image is viewed on these screens by cropping to these ratios demonstrated further: 9:16 First is 9:16, a ratio fit for portraits and tall subject matter. Click on the crop menu and select from the drop down menu 9:16, this will lock the dimensions to the selected ratio as you resize it to fit your need. We are bringing our focal point closer to the naga, eliminating negative space and keeping the apple central to our focus and the man's presence in the frame. The winding tail of the naga character is just slightly visible, which denotes a kind of hidden and secretive nature of the character, some one who is subversive yet alluring with ulterior motives. 16:9 Next is 16:9, the landscape orientation. We are looking to achieve the same goals, getting closer to the subject, eliminating negative space and maintaining the presence of as much the composition as we can. Here we run into some issues, the original piece is a tall 9:16 ratio and our view point makes it so much of the original composition is lost. Taking a 16:9 crop of a tall subject matter loses a lot of elements of the original which might be needed. To improve this would require regenerating a whole new image in 16:9 ratio or rearranging elements with AI to form an entirely different composition, again, another issue for another time.. 1:1 Alternatively, if you want to bring the subject closer while using a crop that retains more imagery using proportionate dimensions, use the 1:1 or square aspect ratio. This won't be taking advantage of the maximum dimensions of your viewing device, but it might be what you're looking for. In conclusion, using these guidelines can improve not just your generated outcome to your liking, but increase other's interest in your works. The amounts to which you change the colors/lighting/saturation are entirely up to you, pick what you like. Try out different crops to change the focus of your image. And most importantly, all of these adjustments you can make within the Design Studio are completely free! So have a blast and experiment in any way you like! Thanks for reading and supporting my blog! Thank you for all the claps!