How to Change Composition in Photoshop

I want to talk a little bit about the composition and we’re going to use this print that was submitted for print competition, and it’s entitled Emily.

The first thing that I noticed about this image when I first look at it is the composition. If you look at an image and if you take an image and split it in four separate quadrants, effectively drawing two lines smacked up in the middle, you can tell basically where the center is and you can tell where the middle is on both directions and kindly give your rule of thumb rough ideas to where the composition lies.

And in this particular image is just to me, it’s not working but I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the ideas that I have about this. So, if we take this, and position four dots in the middle of each of those quadrants, you’ve got roughly what’s called the four quadrants four placements for composition.

Now, these are basic rules of thumb. If you look at Emily, she’s kind of like nowhere, so what do we do about that? Well, let’s look at this a little bit more. If we actually take Emily like I've done here, and I've selected her out and placed her head right about where that dot is in the upper white right quadrant. So obviously, when I can use a white background, let’s just go in and play around with the background.

I’m going to select a couple of colors from the actual image, and a light green, and a dark green. And I'm going to go to filter, render, clouds. I'm going to create a nice cloudy effect. I'm going to go filter, and blur that out some more. Filter and I'm going to Gaussian blur rather, lots of Gaussian blur and you know maybe we can even go in and add some noise.

Now, I don’t want the background to jump out too much so I thought the choice of the background for this particular shot was is a little bit too destructing, so if we want to darken a little more and I'm doing this really quickly. So obviously, we can go into the layer where she is placed and we can do a drop shadow if we wish. We can go in and select the color. It may be a light green and create a back drop.

You don’t want to do too much of this. I'm just kind of working with that really quick here. I would prefer to use a pinstripe around this image here but what I'm talking about again is the composition. Look at this composition versus the original composition. And of course, these rules are sometimes meant to be broken. They can work in different instances when you go on a totally different direction.

Now, when you look at the original image, I just think it’s just not working 100% and following these basic rules of composition is what we need to do here. Just to talk a little bit about the image of why we got it, it’s not in my opinion really working. I would give this image a score of about 78 or 79. I can’t see her see face enough. I like the lighting.

The lighting is really working. We got some nice strong backlighting. I find her clothing very distracting for print competition. This is not good. So, it’s got to be much more dynamic impactive, harmonious for it to come together but follow these rules of composition, at least to improve in that respect. I hope this helps. Thanks.