Dirtied Photograph

I took this photograph of my brother Matt off-roading, and when I did, I knew immediately that I wanted it to be in black and white. The black and white emphasizes all of the dirty, gritty texture really well, and the image itself serves a monochromatic look very well. I got rid of the bit of the vehicle in the frame in the top right corner by selecting the bit of the helmet and neck brace to get the realistic edge I wanted. I then used the content-aware tools in Adobe Photoshop such as the patch tool and the healing and spot healing brush tools to cover up the area with already existing similar pixels from the image.

Next, I made the image black and white, but that wasn’t enough contrast for the look I wanted, so I then applied a black and white gradient map to boost the contrast. Next, I sharpened the photo significantly to really bring out all of the details and the textures. Then I boosted the contrast some more and also brightened and increased the contrast of the surrounding dark portions of the background to frame Matt nicely.