[ASSESTYTEAH]

Here is one I did at work yesterday which I thought I would share.

The original image (left) was taken by DeviantArt memeber Lindsey Tran... and I did a bit of photo-manip for her.

Click to see larger version:



The model in the image is Lindsey's friend Serena, and was sourced frrom another photo pf hers.

Took a couple oh hours.

[eocavrWM]

That's pretty sweet, Cubase! The warm golden hue definitely works nicely to complement that radiant sky. I only wish you'd done a bit to correct that horizon; it seems a bit off axis. Is there any chance you could fill us in on some of your technique or specific tools?

[johnteriz]

Nice;o how did you do the sky?

[welihiedginly]

Wauw.....That's sweet......I really wish I had your skill.

As the others said........Let us know about your technique and tools.
I also wanna know how you made the sky

Good work [thumbup]


One thing though.......IMO the girls left leg looks a little off. What I mean is, it looks wrong like she might have had to rest her food on something........or so.

[satthackacibe]

Very cool [thumbup]

[Txaizdxx]

Thanks for the comments folks!..

in reponse to some of your questions here is a mini tutorial on how I did it...

Tools used:
Photoshop CS3


Basically I found Lindsey's image via DA as I watch her progress, and decided to use this one as the project base:



Now, the reason why I chose this image was not becuase I felt it needed an aesthetic overhaul. It was becuase it was extremely well framed and left a lot to my imagination, I just needed to add my own bits to compliment this idea.

So I dug up to following from another DA artist:



I thought this was the perfect sky to add to the existing image... and so with these two I went to work.


First step was to cut out the original sky... now seeing as the previous sky was mostly one colour you would generally just colour pick it out and remove... but I hate the colour picker wand and prefer to do it by hand, so I used the polygonal lassoo tool and traced around the architacture on the horizon intil I was happy and them removed the sky. I did NOT use a feather on the tool as this tends to blue the edges... in this case I had a 0 feather and made sure anti-aliasing was switched on with the tool.

The end result is this:






Then I placed the sunset behind the traced foreground layer, resized, angled and did a bit of adjusting:





Now of course the forground colouring does not match the sky colouring, and so I used COLOUR BALANCE and nudged the reds and yellows up, and ever so slightly brought in a bit of magenta. Then once I was happy with the colour I used the LEVELS tool to adjust the levels and contrasts. And was left with this:





So it looks much better, but still no where near as glowy or contrasty as it would be if it was a real sunset image. And so I added a little personal trick I came up with which is like adding HDR (high dynamic range) to an image and it works really well. It also helps bring out better contrasts in your layers and allows light to bleed accross the image much like it would in real life...





Now, of course these kinds of clouds would reflect on the water, so I copied the sky, and vertically mirrored it and placed it over the land, and kept only the parts that were over the water, applying it was a luminace blend so that it would automaticaly attach itself to only the parts of the water that were refelcting the original sky:





There is something else odd about this image though... the buldings are not silhouetted enough for such a bright sky. General rule is; if you are taking an image of a bright sky, most things in front of it are going to be silhouetted. And so the further the land got to the horizon I gradually darkened the image:





Finally I took another image of Lindsey's friend Serena and added her to the image for perspective (after a crop, colour balance, level adjustment and the introduction of shadows which I painted on with the normal brush):






I also added a bit more glow to the horizon as well.

And that was the final image!

[genna]

Very nice.....Thanks for the tutorial [thumbup]

And so I added a little personal trick I came up with which is like adding HDR (high dynamic range) to an image and it works really well.

I guess we're not gonna hear about your "little personal trick"????