Photo Manipulation 1

This is the original image before I carried out any editing. It is a photo of  house I took in my village and I used it because I thought it would relate well with my original poster poster that I created which was titled 'That House at the End'.

Some horror posters are black & white due to the conventional setting of horror films being set at night, this and the fact that the house in the photo lacks much colour anyway is the reason that I chose to create a black & white effect. I did this by going to Image > Adjustments > Black & White.

To make the black & white effect a bit more prominent and dramatic, I used the 'Brightness/Contrast' tool to increase the contrast of the whole image. This creates a stronger contrast between the black colouring and the white colouring of the overall image.

To create a more of a horror feel, I used an image that I had taken of tree bark, shown in the above screenshot, then overlaid it on top of the image of the house. I chose to use the image of the image of tree bark to do so because the gaps in the bark look like cracks in a wall or any other surface; and these crack are often present in some horror posters. The few bits of moss seen on the bark will later appear like rot or mould which, from looking at the teaser poster for 'Drag Me To Hell' and other horror posters, is often seen in horror posters.

The next step was to decrease the opacity of the tree bark layer so that it would appear more like cracks rather than bark. This was simply done by lowering the slider of the 'Opacity' tool. Doing this will allow the texture of the bark to be visible on top of the image of the house, while the house remains the most prominent  subject in the image.

In this step I used the gradient tool to create a 'Black to Background' gradient which allows me to create  black gradient in the direction that I apply it. Gradients are often used in horror posters so that image does not fill the whole screen and it also ties with the setting of night that is often used in horror films; or you could argue that the gradient is specifically black to represent the fear of the unknown but again this leads back to nigh and fear of the dark. In the screenshot above you can see that I have already applied a gradient in the bottom left hand corner and you can see me applying the gradient in the top right hand corner (the visible line).

The image above is the final image that I created. Overall I feel that the image follows a horror theme, however I feel as if the house that I chose to photograph was not scary enough and, if I choose to pursue the title of 'That House at the End', I will search for a more appropriate house.