Manip Critiques: BloodyMoonLady’s “Star Fox”

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 | Filed under Articles, Lessons

Here’s the second installment in the Manip Critiques series. I hope this one will be just as well-received as the last. Please note that all suggestions in this article are based on the assumption that Adobe Photoshop is used.

_{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.}

BloodyMoonLady’s “Star Fox”

First Impression & Technical Aspects

The perspective gives the image a certain dynamic that the composition easily picks up on. The fox is the center of attention as it should be acoording to the title, looking straight at the viewer which adds to the feeling of the fox being more than “just an animal”. The woman stands behind it looking at the planet, guiding the viewer’s eye from the fox to its surroundings very effectively. On a technical level however, the manip has its difficulties.

Image Quality

Even though high resolution stock images were chosen as a starting point (which is essential for good image quality), the end-result looks blurry and pixelated. I don’t quite know why: maybe this happened when scaling the images down. In this case, you may want to try using the Unsharp Mask Filter (Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask) to get some clarity back. Or maybe it comes from overusing the smudge tool in which case only *not* using it will work. Also, when saving asa jpeg, don’t save it with too much compression (depends on the image, but I’d say don’t use a quality setting of 8 or less or when using the Save for Web function, not lower than 60 or 70%).

Another thing that may help is to work bigger than you’ll actually put the image up in the end. This will help with all aspects of a picture as it will help to “hide” tiny mistakes that will be very noticable when working in small resolution. Again, after scaling the image down for the upload, you may want to use Unsharp Mask.

Cutting Techniques

There are quite a few spots where it is apparent that the cutting wasn’t done with enough care. Especially in the ropes you can see a tiny almost white line on one side that shouldn’t be there and is very distracting.

There are a million ways to cut something and there is no one right way – just ways that work better in a specific case than others. I will probably give this its own blog entry because there’s so much to tell. For now, I’ll leave it at saying that the pen tool can be helpful when one needs to be very acurate and that using a layer mask and a brush (and if available a tablet) almost never fails even though it is definitely more work.

“Short Cuts” like the extraction filter or the magic wand tool etc. should only be used when unsure if the image is the right one and you only need a way to quickly see if it’ll fit into your composition. These short cuts usually leave jagged edges behind that look very unnatural, especially when working with a low resolution. So once you settle n an image to put in your composition, put in the effort to cut it, it’ll be worth it (and practice makes perfect, so you’ll get faster every time you do it).

Turning Day into Night

Lighting a night scene is always tricky, especially so if the stock used was shot by day. To make things easier on oneself, I reccommend using daylight stock without any harsh sunlight, which is also what the artist did here. The amount of light and dark works rather well, as do the shadows and the directions of them.

However, it is apparent that the colours used to create the light were devoid of colour: white for highlights and black for shadows. This is something that will never ever work in terms of realism. Our eyes perceive the world through interpreting light that has been thrown back by the surroundings. You can think of it as a beam that hits a mirror: it will be reflected in full and your eyes will notice the light’s original colour, usually white. In optics, white is seen when all colours – or wave lengths – are present. If you replace the mirror with a surface that does not reflect totally, some of the light’s colours will be absorbed by the material. What you see is “white minus absorbed colour”. For example something that looks blue absorbs yellow light.

Physically speaking, there are no materials that absorb all light in reality, only in theory (see black body). There are only materials that absorb most light making us think the shadow we see is black. But in reality, it is not. The fact that we see light that has been reflected also means that highlights cannot be pure white either: even if the light source was white (or nearly white) the interaction between the material and the light will leave us with a coloured highlight.

What we see as pure white or pure black in these instances is a trick of the mind that always thinks in relatives and will mostly notice something being “really light” as white, especially when set against darker and more saturated tones.

A manipulator should therefore never use white or black to paint shadows and highlights, but use light shades of colours that are already in the image. Also, if for example the fox’s fur is of a golden colour, you can use a darker shade of that for the shadow on the floor. Light bounces not only directly from sun/moon to object and into your eyes, but it also takes other routes, for example the light from the fox gets bounced off the floor, leaving traces of the light’s colour behind even though one wouldn’t claim that a wooden floor is much of a reflective surface. The point is that it has to be reflective in some fashion for us to be able to see it in the first place.

I hope this part wasn’t too scientific. So to sum it up: use shades instead of black and white to create shadows/highlights and remember that light bounces off of everything.

Proportion & Position of the Planet

Lastly, the position of the planet to the left looks a bit off. It feels more like a giant ball that’s about to fall on the deck instead of a planet in the sky. One reason is the position itself – maybe if you put it more to the right so it goes behind the ropes, it’ll look more natural. Another reason is the lighting that doesn’t seem consistent with the light coming from behind and from the planet: why does it have a blue atmosphere when the whole planet looks like a red giant? And where does the light-reflex come from when the main light source is off to the far right? Sure there can be multiple light sources, but it has to be consistent somehow.

Outro

I hope this was helpful – all comments are welcome as always. If something was unclear, don’t hesitate to ask: perhaps then an article on the subject of its own would be in order.

Tags: composition, critique, cutting, layer mask, light & shadow, stock

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