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 Post subject: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 1:31 pm  (#1) 
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Okay guys, I thought I'd post this one as I'm after advice on how to make it better.
I'm pretty please with it but there's always room for improvement, and in all honesty I'm right out of ideas on how to do that.
One thing I did notice when working on this image was that Gimp was starting to struggle when trying to render some of the effects. The file size when open in Gimp weighed in at 1.6GB and had 30 plus layers so I guess that that might have had something to do with the slowness. Also my PC a bit on the old side now, it's a 32bit with a max of 4GBs of memory.

Thanks for any comments on this and here's a link to a bigger version over at Deviantart. http://fav.me/d5wugt4

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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:17 pm  (#2) 
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I think it looks very good, lot's of detail and lighting effects. It must have been a lot of work.

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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:31 pm  (#3) 
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caz: that's a really cool picture!!! i love the atmosphere in it. i wonder about the mask in the police car, though. is it supposed to be a masked person sitting in the car or a mask hanging in the window? somehow it doesn't look right either way, i think.

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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 4:05 pm  (#4) 
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I'll get directly to the 'room for improvement' you asked for, remember, this is _my_ point of view, only mine (:

- police car seems to be slightly floating (blending issue) -> working on the shadows under the car will help
- bright car (lighting issue) -> the scene lighting doesn't match the car lighting, car is too bright (probably too crisp also), compare the whites in the scene to see what I mean.
- this yellow lit window in the penumbra (contrast issue) draws too much attention, spectator's eye must be guided to important details in your scene, I think this window is not important.


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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 5:07 pm  (#5) 
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Excellent work but do agree with the previous to posts.

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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 5:26 pm  (#6) 
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Nice job, Caz! Just mute the colors of the car and that window a bit (i believe they are separate layers in gimp file). You can use patdavid's "mute colors' script or do it in with gimp Color tools. Also, the shadow underneath car is too bright compared to overall environment lighting condition, you might wanna tone it down too.


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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 10:54 pm  (#7) 
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Nice work! The atmosphere is great.

I agree with the posts above. Also, the kitty needs shadows... unless he's a flying kitty :)


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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 1:39 pm  (#8) 
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Thank you guys for all the comments. I really appreciate it and the advice is solid stuff, just the kind of thing I was looking for. :bigthup

It took a couple of weeks to put this together, lots of experimenting and hunting of stock involved but it was good to work on an image this big.

Alas, the mask in the window is the best I can do for adding some driver detail. I'm just no good at painting stuff and was unable to find a stock image that I could use that would create a realistic driver. This is a point that needs more work.

Would I be right in thinking that the shadow under the car needs to be fainter, as in blurring it some more so that it sits better on the road? I also see about the brightness of the car. I hadn't noticed this until I compared the white parts of the car with the other whites in the scene. Well observed that one.

The window light was a way to add a more night time atmosphere but it's obviously too bright. Easy enough to change though as all the elements to the image are on separate layers, even to extent that there are nine layers for the headlight lights alone. I did get a bit carried away with them.

There is a bit of a shadow behind the kitty - I do love to put one of the furry fiends in my pictures if I can - but it's obviously not working too well so more work needed on that one.

I did use the G'mic filter 'Mixer rgb' which is under Colours to do the initial darking of the image, it seems to have a good effect by moving the red, green and blue brightness sliders down, but I'm going to check out 'patdavids' mute colours script and see how I fare with that. Thanks for the tip.

It means a lot to know what other folk think of my stuff, so I was well pleased when I logged in tonight. Thank you all, and now lots of work to do to bring this one up to scratch.

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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 2:23 pm  (#9) 
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Caz wrote:
Would I be right in thinking that the shadow under the car needs to be fainter, as in blurring it some more so that it sits better on the road?

Yep. This is what I would do, roughly, note that this preset is for a mouse, not a tablet:


Attachments:
dithersmudging shadow.jpg
dithersmudging shadow.jpg [ 67.21 KiB | Viewed 1586 times ]


Last edited by anarkhya on Wed Mar 06, 2013 3:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 06, 2013 1:36 pm  (#10) 
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Thanks for the tip, anarkhya. I just tried out the smug tool and the brush shown in the screenshot and I can get a reasonable effect but not as good as the one shown. Trouble is my smudge settings look different - I'm using 2.8.4 on Linux - and I don't speak a word of French - us native English speakers can be so ignorant of other languages. Any chance of a translation.

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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 06, 2013 3:13 pm  (#11) 
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Sorry, I forgot that these menus have changed since 2.8, I updated the screenshot in my previous post, still with 2.6 but in english this time, so, hopefully, you may figure out how to reproduce the settings.


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 Post subject: Re: Prowler.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 1:17 pm  (#12) 
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Thanks for the updated screenshot :coolthup I've managed to get the tool settings so they are the same as in the screenshot, just need to experiment with the shadow layer now.
Cheers.

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