I started to manipulate my collages in Photoshop by changing the levels, hue and saturation of the whole collages. I also inverted some of these just to see what effect it would create. Then I decided to separate the actual letters and manipulate them on a different layer to the background. Then I combined these together again to see what would happen. Below is the result of this experimentation:
I wasn’t happy with any of the above edits and decided that I wanted to see how the letters would look on their own without the background. I think without Photoshop the background looked good however I felt that it diverted attention from the actual letters. Below is the result of this experimentation:
I prefer my letters to be presented on their own because they look neat and more professional. I dropped the saturation of the image and increased the levels which I think is quite effective. The black and white letter also looks good but at the same time it looks like something an amateur would produce and I want my letter form to be of a high standard. Simple black and white letter seems like a lazy Photoshop development that’s why I decided to stick to color. I wanted to see if the same approach would work with other letters like the with one below:
Below are some more examples of my experimentation. I particularly like the last upper case B where I inverted the colors. The bright lines on the brain look like neurons traveling across the brain. However I tried to invert the color on the other letters and sadly it didn’t have the same effect as the images used for the collage didn’t have much color in them.
The last problem I had to face was the low quality of some of the images I used for the collages. Some of them were very pixelated after I printed them out. I covered it up by adding a texture to the letters which works quite nicely with the underlying theme driving this project: texture. Below is an example of my final letter form:
