• Biography
  • Portfolio

The Starving Artist

~ Still an artist but no longer starving!

The Starving Artist

Tag Archives: Facebook

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

 

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Facebook – to share or not to share.

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in General, Photography

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

blogging, business, content consumption, Facebook, facebook friends, Facebook Timeline, FB, IPad, iPhone, Online Communities, photo sharing, Photograph, photography, photos, social media, Social network, social networking, technology, Uploading and downloading

Morning,

Facebook is big, no, Facebook is HUGE, there are 7 billion people in the world and as of September 2012 there were 1 billion active Facebook accounts!

A staggering 44% of all Internet users are Facebook users and there are 600 million mobile Facebook users.

Facebook is hugely popular for sharing photos, in fact there are reports that we upload 300 million photos a day, every day and some figures are available to suggest that Facebook hosts nearly 230 billion of our photos – truly mind staggering figures.

It’s very easy to see from these figures that content we upload can be seen by a huge amount of people around the world. This can be fantastic for getting content seen by the masses, we are becoming a content consumption society, with our iPads & iPhones we constantly crave content, consuming with an insatiable appetite.

But problems can arise when content is posted that specifically elicits opinions from the masses. A good example if this happened recently, a clothing designer took a photograph of a model wearing one of his new designs, he immediately uploaded the photo to his Facebook timeline and asked for opinions on the photo. As expected there were tens of responses from his Facebook friends all saying things like, “wow, great photo”. But then someone shared that post with a person outside his circle of friends (Facebook security is overly complicated – but that’s another post)

Very soon the post generated slightly less favourable comments – nothing too disparaging – just constructive criticism. As is the way Facebook works I saw this post on another timeline, the picture was of a very well known model, and the clothes looked great on her, but the overall photo could have been significantly improved.

Within 30 minutes of the first “negative post” there were dozens of truly horrible comments made, mostly, believe it or not, by the original poster, the clothing supplier, in response to the negative comments. I watched the thread descend into vitriol and abuse and I finally reported the Facebook user when death threats were made.

The post was swiftly taken down by Facebook and I heard the clothing supplier server a three day Facebook ban.

The point of this story is that art, all forms of art, be it music, paintings, photos etc is very subjective, just because you think it is fantastic, does not mean everyone will think it’s fantastic. With a billion Facebook users you can bet there will be some that don’t like your art. The masses are not qualified to give objective opinion, if you want or need objective opinion find and join one of the many Facebook groups that suits your particular art form.

Best – Colin

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Recent Posts

  • 627 Days
  • Top 5 Inspirational Photographers and artists
  • 5 Top Tips for a stress free photoshoot
  • 25 top tips and advice for becoming a better photographer
  • Interview with a model – Lorena Fernandez

Archives

  • March 2015
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,671 other followers

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

LCC Photography

LCC Photography

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • The Starving Artist
    • Join 1,671 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • The Starving Artist
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: