Me eating seaweed (pretty bad angle & framing though)

2) "Grand Theft Auto V Remastered"

4)

My work

This is my original photo

This is one of the photos I didn't end up using because of the angle I held the game at, which potentially wouldn't sync with the flat photos I would edit in.

1) I decided to do a photo-job on Grand Theft Auto (GTA V to be specific). The game is often ridiculed for being sexist in its depiction of gender roles. In the game, the characters who are male are often shown to be people who are able to handle themselves, are emotionally tough, and generally people who produce most of the work in society. On the other hand, women are shown as people who can't handle themselves, are emotionally weak, and generally as people who leech off others' (men's) productivity.

Having played the game myself, I am not going to be ignorantly bashing the game as an abomination to modern entertainment. I love the game myself and have played for hours and hours. However, I can't help but notice the way gender roles were tacitly placed into the game. You have male characters who are constantly shooting guns, engaging in combat, and breaking laws. Then you have women who are constantly in need of help, women who can't tell from fiction to reality. 

The game is known for being violent and full of action. Only for the dudes that is.

The game's cover itself already implies that those who engage in adrenaline-inducing activity are male. There is a guy on the motorcycle, Trevor (guy on the right) is hold a rifle, Franklin (guy at the bottom) is holding a handgun, and Michael (guy at the top) is wearing a gas mask as if he's preparing for combat. 

I decided to make my concept based on this. On my project, you would notice that every single one of the characters that I have placed in the game's cover is in fact, a female (well, except one of them) from Japanese media. My photo-job serves as satire against GTA, which itself is known as a game full of satire. 

The irony is that the game establishes unequal gender roles as a business tactic in order to attract a certain demographic (teenage or young-adult males) but often criticizes modern business practices with satire against the corporate world.

In my version, the characters, which are female, are holding guns, on motorcycles, and generally also have a menacing look like the characters in the original cover. Why do characters who are violent and self-capable always males? Why not female? On the other hand, why can't men also be characters who fail to handle themselves? However, one should note that my concept pokes fun at not only the game's, but also general society's depiction of gender roles. People who see my personal cover of the game will unconsciously react in shock, because it wouldn't be expected that it would be anime girls shooting guns, breaking laws, and being a social-negative. It's also a bit funny, at least in my opinion.

The third part of my concept, which is less of a social critique and more of a personal preference, is that I simply like the characters in my photo, and decided to incorporate them in a game cover, which design allows for a collage-like placement for my favorites...

This is a reference for the main, original photographs. A lot of distorting, perspective changes, filter changes, lasso-ing, other various color adjustments, and other transformations were implemented, on some more than others (Flandre, the girl with the handgun, probably took the most work).

Put together, this project represents a compilation for a dream game that I would like, as evidenced by the original photograph itself, which shows me holding the game. The fact that I'm holding it shows that it's pretty personal to me.

3) I wouldn't say I'm too happy with my work. I can say I'm satisfied though. I'm still learning Photoshop but I've been starting my own outside-of-school photo manipulations with the program and I think it's a lot of fun. For this project, there are still some flaws such as perspective problems and others that are mostly related to the lasso tool. Layer masks played a huge role for my adjustment layers, but I could have probably also used them directly for my actual layers containing my pictures too.

5) To make image adjustments for features such as brightness and color balance, I simply left-clicked the layer that I wanted to adjust, hovered over one of the "adjustment options between "libraries" and "styles", then clicked of one them. One adjustment I probably made for most of my layers were filters. I wanted my photo to be pretty homogeneous in terms of color tone. Some of my photos didn't fit well together, and I had to fix that. 

For example:

 These two photos don't really fit. One is very bright and has a lot of contrast, and the other is dark and has less of a contrast between colors. What I did was lower the contrast, brightness, and filtered the top image to make it look for fitting. After that, you can see that it at least (in my opinion) looks better together:

 I'd say I did like this project but I feel like there's a lot of improvement still out there for me. I also hope that people who view my project notice the subtle and small things such as the obey hat, sunglasses, "Rated-E", anime girl on the aircraft, among others.