I used Adobe Photoshop to edit a pair of photos to look like old police archive photos of murder investigations in the school.

The first image is a clear ‘establisher’ of the fact that they were committed in school.

The ‘Special Investigations Unit’ and ‘EVIDENCE’ stamps are fictional police stamps that add realism to the photo and increase it’s validity for the audience.

The sepia/ monochrome colour palette of the photos enforces realism by connoting their timely production during the late 1960s/ early 1970s.

Photo 1. There is a change of colour as the photo is supposedly from old police archives. The use of photoshopto add in the blood and stamp also add to the realism.

Before

Aft

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Before

Aft

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1. open the photo

2. Creating new layer (adjustment layer for the blood)

Select the elliptical marquee tool and highlight the approximate position of you pool of blood. Then select your desired tint of red, set it as fore-ground and hit Alt-Backspace (for Windows) to fill your selected area. De-select the area and then duplicate you original photo to move it to the very front of the layer order.

While selecting the top layer zoom in to the person, select the mask layer option, select the paint brush, set it to black and go over EVERYTHING in the layer APART from the person. Zoom in close if you need to. When you are done you should be left with a picture of the fellow strewn on the ground in an obscenely oval-shaped pool of blood.

Selecting the blood layer, use the smudge tool to stretch out and bend the shape of the pool of blood to make it look reasonable. Also use the burn tool to darken the blood in places close to the body to give it that authentic look.

Main part is done, you should have 3 layers - the main photo layer, the blood layer and the layer with only the person in it. Now merge everything by either hitting Ctrl – Shift – E or going to the ‘Layer’ menu and selecting ‘Merge Visible’

The last cosmetic touches are also important, firstly go to Filter – Noise – Median and add a minimal blur of around 10 pixels. Next go to Image – Adjustments –hue&saturation and remove around 90% of the saturation, highlight the tint box and select a yellowish tint. After this, depending on your photo you would normally need to twitch the contrast of the photo through Image – Adjustments – Curves but that all depends. Next select the Burn tool again, which we used for the blood, at the top of the page select ‘Shadows ‘and set the intensity to 50-60%; go over the border of the photo in a circular motion to create some distortion and darken in. Create the stamp using the Text and Elliptical marquee tools.