Manip Critique: arrsistable’s “The Earth Goddess”

Monday, October 20th, 2008 | Filed under Articles, Lessons

In my recent journal on deviantart, I asked fellow manippers if they wanted one image of their critiqued extensively on my blog, so that not only they could get some insight, but other readers might learn a bit, too — the response was overwhelming and so this will be the first critique in a whole series.

_{If you’re interested in being featured & critiqued on this blog, too, please write me an e-mail or note me on dA with a link to the image and your permission for me to put it online on Daydream Believer. Please understand that I will not be able to critique everything that is sent to me. I try to choose the ones that I feel make for the best learning experience.}

arrsistable’s “The Earth Goddess”

First Impression & Technical Aspects

The first thing I notice is that the title and the image fit together, not only thematically, but also colour-wise. The blending has been done with care, there are no stray pixels that have been left over when cutting. If the artist hadn’t written in the comment that the horse has been composed from several pictures, one couldn’t tell.

Composition

The composition is well thought out: the horse rests is in the top right corner, it’s body being one third from the top and from the right (red lines, see below). The light blue lines indicate that the mane, tail and legs as well as the head position and even the horn guide the viewer’s eyes to the horse.

The darker blue lines indicate lines found in the surroundings that serve as a frame for the horse. The thing here that doesn’t work quite so well is the lines that the trees in the back form (green). They’re not quite framing any more because they touch the horse’s tail/hind legs – and they guide the viewer’s eyes to the ground instead of the horse. That is a minor detail though.

The only thing I would reccommend trying in terms of composition, is to crop the picture at the bottom, so the cross where the red lines meet in the top right will come to rest on the horse’s head instead of its body. This will shift the focus more towards the character of the horse.

Cutting out the foreground (where nothing important was shown anyway) also helps with the focus, even though the cross isn’t on the head itself like this (maybe try bringing the horse down a bit so it’s not so close to the top). This crop also seems to work better with the trees.

Colour & Light

The earthy tones work well for the theme. Although especially the painted parts (tale, mane) seem to be oversaturated. Especially in the Close Ups it is evident that the leaves have an unnatural glow because of this. They are very uniform in colour, too, which is probably the cause for that “not quite natural”-feeling for me: especially with leaves and in a forest setting, you have patches of light and dark everywhere. This doesn’t just go for the leaves, but also for the background. This truly can be a bitch to get right in manips.

Adding patches of light & dark: To make the leaves more natural, I’d suggest to first desaturate them a bit and then use a layer on top set to soft light on which you can paint some highlights and shadows (NOT with pure black or white). The soft light blend mode will also help add some more different colours in and it’ll help make some things more saturated than others without having to jump through hoops.

“Multiply” is a good blendmode to lay the foundation for some shadows, but it also makes things look very flat very fast. Try restricting your usage of that blend mode and instead try Soft Light, Overlay or maybe Color Burn/Linear Burn if you need a strong effect. Remember: no pure black or white!

Light also gets reflected from the souroundings all the time, so using the eye dropper to pick a dark colour from the background and using that for shadows will work wonders for blending.

Depth of Field

It is important that a picture has a sense of depth – this can be achieved in multiple ways. Here, it looks like it was chosen to a) make the background darker (see Colour & Light for tips) and b) blur it, or at least leave it out of focus a bit. The technique is a good one, but it needs to be applied carefully.

Using blur to create a sense of depth: The effect will usually be a very subtle one, unless you are trying to immitate macro photos, where a great depth of field (i.e. a great amount of blur) will occur. If a normal wide angle lense is used, the effect should not be that great at all for the first few meters/feet. I’d say if the camera focuses on something in the foreground the blur might start for things that are 5 or 10 meters (15 to 30 feet) or more away. This is based on my gut feeling though, you may want to look at (or even take) some actual photos to get a feeling what does actually work here.

The reason it doesn’t quite work here is that especially when comparing the right part to the left, the right one seems more blurry than it should be. On top of that, there seems to be a branch in the foreground in the top right corner that is just as blurry as the background when it should be clearer or at least blurred in a different way.

Outro

I hope this information was useful, not only for arrsistable, but also for others who like to know a bit more about photomanipulation. If any particular aspect interests you, I always welcome suggestions for future tutorials or articles.

Thank you arrsistable for letting me “have at it” without restrictions. Please visit her gallery for more of her beautiful creations.

Tags: blend modes, colour, composition, critique, depth, light & shadow, photomanipulation

6 Comments to Manip Critique: arrsistable’s “The Earth Goddess”