Editing the Final Picture

The first thing I did with my picture was crop it. I tried a few different crops but I wanted the picture to look widescreen like a movie still, so the trim I decided to use was the third and fourth. I like the composition with the three characters to one side of the screen with the other half like negative space. The first edit I made, I upped the contrast and lowered the brightness. I wanted the picture to look like we were sitting outside in the dark but because of the lighting, when I cropped out the sky, it looked like daytime. Lowering the brightness and making the contrast higher really helped to change the scene to night-time. I also lowered the saturation slightly too fade some of the picture but unfortunately that looked odd with the colours. I corrected the colour by adding some red to the picture but for some reason adding the red made the faces look very pink. I didn't like this edit so I started a new one, using the same crop. In this one I basically worked the same way but I made the picture even darker added more contrast and left the colours. I also added a vignette effect because I thought this would make the photo look more cinematic but instead it just distorted the picture and made me look stretched out. The third edit (the final one), I re-cropped the original picture so there was more negative space and now had the entrance to the garden. I used the curves tool to heightened the shadows and make the picture overall darker. Then I  added more contrast to the picture to help with the colour. I felt however that the colours looked too natural and I decided to add a blue tone to the picture, using the colour wheel, to make it more interesting to look at and to add an element mystery to the picture but also a calmness, like the calm after/before the storm. To add to the negative space I used the paint tool and coloured in the darkest area black so it would be darker. I tried the vignette effect on this also but again, it distorted the picture and I thought the picture looked more polished before I added the effect.

Original picture

First edit

Second edit

Third edit + vignette 

Final edit