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The Starving Artist

~ Still an artist but no longer starving!

The Starving Artist

Tag Archives: Compositing

627 Days

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Colin Crowdey in General, Photography

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

animals, Compositing, pets, photography, positivity

Six hundred and twenty seven days!! Or 1 year 8 months and 19 days, or….15048 hours, or even 54,127,800 seconds…but what ever way you look at it, its been a very long time.

Since what – well, my last post on this blog of course!

Hope you missed me, heck, I missed me! But what have I been doing these last 627 days that has not enabled me to post here?

Well since my last post I have – to paraphrase –  gotten divorced, moved home (twice) sold my Photography Studio (to pay lawyers!!) had to deal with a new partner getting breast cancer and had my driving licence taken away by the DVLA because of illness!

But………

Rather than have this a negative blog post I’ll finish on the positives of which there are lots !

I still shoot the odd fashion or model shoot but I have morphed more into Training and image manipulation (Photoshopping). I’m in the process of now setting up a new business arm of my empire photographing pets, my license is likely to be returned to me within the next 4-6 weeks, my GF is free of the cancer and Summer is almost here

So all is well with the world.

See you next time (before 627 days)

Cheers

Colin.

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Creating Composite Images – Part 3

16 Saturday Feb 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photoshop

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Tags

Adobe Photoshop, art, Compositing, Computer-generated imagery, Graphics, Photograph, Shadow, Visual art

Evening

This is my third and final post in the series on compositing images using Adobe Photoshop – the first post can be read here , and the second post here

My two previous posts have centred around creating fairly simple composites, a background image and two foreground images composited together to create a simple yet believable fantasy image.

For my last post though I will focus on showing how I created a complex composite image, using a mixture of real photographs, computer generated images and complex brushes.

Here is the final fantasy image – The Midnight Hour – with Jessica Truscott

finished version

 

What looks a fairly simple and believable image started out as four actual photographs (Model and birds) five computer generated images (background, mansion, skeleton, skull and zombie) and three photoshop brushes, the moon, the mist and the sparkles in the models right hand.

Here are the images in separation

composite full

By far the biggest challenge when compositing images – aside from getting the lighting and the colour between all images correct, is the loss of the shadow on the ground when you cut the image out. We all create shadows on the ground and a shadow in an image is what creates depth and realism.

Creating a ‘realistic shadow’ underneath a person can be time consuming at best – nigh on impossible at worst. Many well known photoshop photo manipulators actually refrain from showing the feet of a cut out in the final image for this very reason.

In almost all of my fantasy images I DO show the feet, but I use mist, fog, or other tricks to blur and disguise the fact that there is not a correct shadow in place.

If you take the mist away from the final image both the model and the house are clearly cutout – but put the mist back in and not only do you have realistic atmosphere but the mist also conveniently hides and blurs the areas that have no shadow when they SHOULD have shadow – and you end up with a convincing fantasy composite image.

I hope you have enjoyed my short series on compositing images and have learnt a little bit to give it a try yourself

best – Colin

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Creating Composite Images – Part 2

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photoshop

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adobe Photoshop, Arts, Blend modes, business, Compositing, fantasy images, illustration, Image, Photoshop

Afternoon

Following on from my last post about compositing images, here, I’d like to show you how I created my “Snow Queen” image – quite apt considering the current British weather.

I had been looking at shooting a particular image to go with the composite I had in mind, however circumstances always conspired against either the shoot or the look I had in mind. I was doing some housekeeping in my shoot library and I came across an image that was marked as “throw away”. The image was part of a beach bridal shoot back in December and it didn’t quite cut the mustard.

However, the pose and hand placement were exactly what I was looking for for my snow queen idea.

This is the finished “Snow Queen” fantasy image with the lovely Miss Laura Mai

snow queen finished

This particular creation was (relatively) simple as I was using only a single background image. The following show the three main articles that went into making this composite.

snow queen composite

 

I explained in my previous post that the secret to successful compositing is getting the right perspective (with focal length of lenses) and lighting that matches foreground and background.

The other ingredient for successful images is matching colour between foreground and background images. Now while there are a number of ways to achieve this, this is the method I use. In Photoshop duplicate your background layer and move it to the top of the layer stack. With the duplicate layer still selected, go to the menu bar and select Filter>Blur>Average. Set the blend mode to “Colour” and then lower the opacity to around 20-25% – you may want to ad a layer mask to mask of the background – but that’s it, a simple trick that will match the colour of your foreground image to your background.

This image in total took around two hours to complete – there are only 17 layers in this image and the file size (unflattened) is 130MB.

The sparkles, wings, snow and staff were all added to the image for added realism and finally a small amount of mist was added to the lower part of the image to soften it up.

in my next post on Compositing images I’ll show you how I created a more complex fantasy image

Best – Colin

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Creating Composite Images – Part 1

18 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photoshop

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Adobe Photoshop, Arts, Background light, Composite Images, Compositing, Facebook, fantasy images, Graphics, light, photography, Photoshop

Morning

I have spent a lot of time recently creating fantasy composite images for a new venture of mine. I have not blogged about them only posted them on my Facebook page. A lot of my Facebook fans have asked how they were created – and whilst I’m not going to write a full blown tutorial on compositing images I felt I could put something together that shows how the images are created and how much work goes into creating them.

The key to creating believable composite images is in choosing the correct images for the composite. All the images should have have been shot with the same focal length of lens, to ensure perspective is consistent have the same depth of field and the lighting should be the same across the images. Colour is very important too – and in my next blog post I’ll share a top tip for ensuring consistent colour between background and foreground images.

The most important piece of the puzzle though is lighting. Light can come from any and everywhere in life, there can be soft shadows, hard shadows or no shadows at all and even a mixture of them all – a composite images will look totally fake if the light and the shadows to not match between background and foreground images.

Ideally you should go out and shoot your subject with a composite in mind – that way you can shoot the subject in a way that will fit in with your composite backgrounds. For instance, if you have already chosen your background images and they have directional lighting with soft shadows – you can light your subject to fit in with that.

Some people prefer to shoot the primary subject in a studio setting, so they have total control over the lighting – this is not necessarily a bad thing, but shooting outside can sometimes give you a quality of light that can never be replicated in a studio. My personal preference is neither, I use studio subjects as well as outdoor subjects.

Background stock images can be sourced from a variety of places, if you shoot landscapes or architecture you will probably already have some great images that can be used for compositing – but if not you can spend a serious amount of time searching places like Deviant Art, or iStockphoto or any of the other microstock websites out there. Some stock you may have to pay a few pounds for, others are free, its up to you to decide on what’s best for you – but there are plenty of amazing stock images out there.

Right – enough of the pre-amble. This is an image of the lovely Gemma, daughter of my favourite Bridal Wear supplier.

Gemma in magical forrest

Gemma in magical forest

This is a composite of two background images, the forest trees, the flowers in the foreground and Gemma. Gemma was actually shot in a studio environment for this shot.

This is the composite image BEFORE any work has begun.

Before

Gemma was backlit in the studio and you can see the beautiful light on her hair – this fits in ok with the final image as although the background trees are misty – they are brighter than the foreground – adding a shaft of light in with a photoshop technique adds realism to the lighting on Gemmas’ hair.

In total, this image took around four hours to create, there are 117 individual layers in Photoshop and the unflattened file size is 270 MB. The butterflies, shafts of light and sparkles are all created in Photoshop, using pre-made brushes. Butterflies were coloured and transformed to different sizes for realism.

Finally I coloured the image an overall violet to match the foreground flowers and keep up the overall fantasy woodland theme.

In my next post I’ll show you how I created a fantasy snow queen complete with horses.

Best – Colin

 

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