Extricate vs. gerbick :: Stop, drop and roll...

[Extricate]

This is just going out as an inquiry, but does anyone feel like starting a battle? I would like to start doing this again, so if anyone else is willing and able to commit, I will have an image and details once I get a challenger!

[gerbick]

Bring it.

[Extricate]

ok, i should have an image up and ready by friday. (i didnt want to start anything only because i wasnt sure how the arena is nowadays).

Size: 800x600
Rotation: allowed
Must take image from previous volley
Rounds: 3 or 4
Turnaround: 3 days

Sound good?

[gerbick]

Sounds great to me... can't wait to see what you start with.

[ondraedan]

Looking forward to it!

[Extricate]

[gerbick]

lol. It actually took me a moment to figure out what you had added and what was originally there.

Now that's a good composition. I'll be up with mine in a day or so.

[littleMatt]

Looking forward to it!

Same same - this is gonna be good!

[thedarkness]

Now that just down right cute

[lefteyewilly]

me wants mor purdy picshurrs.

[Planet]

Insane!

[Extricate]

thanks lol. I wasnt so sure about the excecution, as I had soo many ideas for the picture.

[gerbick]

I'm almost finished with my image, but I might delay one day due to a 14 hour day. Sorry about that.

[gerbick]

Sorry for the delay... 12+ hour days will do it to you each and every time.

[groupof1]

Nice... I like it.

[pea3698]

That image is SMOKIN' baby. One thing bothering my eyes is the focus on the hand. Mose of it is out of focus but some of it is in focus. The issue being the depth of field. The clouds and the smoke in areas should be extremely blurry. The planes are on the fence they look like they are flying in the focus band but at the same time they feel far away.

I love you images G, I especially love the sky in this one. It has that Ray of Light cloud feeling about it. Very fun image. Great Job.

[silverx2]

i think the focus adds alot of depth to the picture, and also makes the hand blend in more

[Zacaboo288]

I see what you are saying, Pea, but I actually agree with silver overall. It's technically off but I think it works, at least for me personally. Great image, gerbick. Same to you extricate. Both very creative. Sorry it's late, that's all I got for crits.

[pea3698]

Oh I am with you guys. It works and works well. I was trying to look at it from a more technical point and that is when it started bothering me. I know that Gerbick pay very close attention to every detail and every point of focus and I was just wondering what made him make his choice with the focus.

I only hope to learn from the master (c:

Shoot, who am I to say anything, I haven't thrown down in here in a very long time.

[gerbick]

I can try to explain; however I'm not sure what's "out of focus".

The hand and cigarette - which is actually pitched away from the screen but pulled back in focus because their scale is similar. Without a horizon and/or vantage point - pulled away by way of pulling the background out and forcing focus - and an obvious play with scale, I had to use soft-focus to provide a sense that it was not as flat as it could have been.

So Extricate's package, sans Bear-man now has a parachute that casts a shadow that follows the light source (from the right)... the yellow and front red plane are in focus, with the bottom right red plane moving into soft-focus to show that it was moving away from the viewer. The top right red/black plane is in full spft-focus because it's further away, but the scale prevents it from being massively blurry. And the top left plane is in soft-focus transitioning to full-focus because it's turning to the viewer.

The clouds being in "good enough" focus, not as sharp as the original but not depth-of-field focus, was a choice I made - I have them in blurry depth-of-field focus in my original *.psd - but decided against them because it's simply a backdrop, not a vantage point/device.

It's the same way you can take a picture of somebody 1 meter in front of you, but the clouds miles away are in "good enough" detail. In fact, the clouds in this image were taken by me while at the Charleston Aquarium and I was overlooking the bay towards the new Cooper River suspension bridge (you can actually see my rush job masking and due to a last second movement, the top white/angled cables are still visible when I rotated the image 10 minutes before I uploaded and didn't catch that mistake). That's why the cloud trails for the planes are in full focus - which honestly they're in soft-focus from my originals and they also regard the light source if you're paying attention to the highlights and structure of them (they're 3D btw).

That's my take on it. The original plane was brought back into focus via sharpening. The box though, once sharpened contrasted too much against the hands/cigarette so I soft-focused it again - which came once I scaled it once more anyway and duplicated the layer, desaturated the box and parachute and then used Soft Light to sharpen a few shadows but keep the soft-focus - just to show scale.

I hope that makes sense. And weird that I didn't think of any of this while doing the image... I just "did it" and went with what looked like what I saw in my head.