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Thread: Natsia Vs SilverX

  1. #1
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    Natsia Vs SilverX

    Didn't want to keep you waiting and I did this a while back.

    Standard Rules:
    - Maintain Canvas Size
    - No Rotation
    - Use one element from previous image
    - 4 day turn around



    Stocks:
    http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/8...dd69ao1nq7.jpg
    http://img174.imageshack.us/img174/6...884082axz5.jpg
    http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/2...50440gyje0.jpg
    http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4...00523b1zk9.jpg
    Lyrics: Interpol _ All fired up

    Bring it.

  2. #2
    Chaos silverx2's Avatar
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    ill take a look at this when i get home tonight
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  3. #3
    FK'n Elitist Super Mod EVPohovich's Avatar
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    Nice work Nats... You took a mediocre blonde and made her look like Kate Beckinsale... A massive improvement

    Great use of color, and blending. Not so sure about the type, but who am I to knock it. That is always my weak point.

    Definitely

    Very cool...!

  4. #4
    anyone else hear that? flashpipe1's Avatar
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    Sweet...the colors blend beautifully, nice overall composition. Something seems a bit off on the chess board. I can't tell if it's the perspective, if it looks like it extends into the wall or if it's just my eyes after looking at my monitors all day and not sleeping enough last night...

    Liked the font, but had to squint to read it...

    And I LOVE the dye job, even though I generally prefer blondes...lol...

    If you don't mind sharing, what sort of tricks did you use to blend the colors so smoothly (the fabric she's on, the leather & star textures)? Did you adjust the colors in each layer?

    Nice! Can't wait to see what silver uses...
    Love like you've never been hurt, live like there's no tomorrow and dance like nobody's watching.

  5. #5
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    This image is over 4 months old, I think... Put it together for a battle that never took off and thought I might as well use it for something.
    @ Evp, HUGE praise coming from you. I am truly humbled and thank you for taking the time out to comment. Thank you.
    @ Flash I'm more than happy to, if you don't mind I'll give a walk through on the image tomorrow. Just finished cooking dinner for my better and myself :P
    Just a quick note on the fabric, the only real fabric used in the picture is around her knee... The rest was painted in. More on that tomorrow.

  6. #6
    Chaos silverx2's Avatar
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    just so i get this right, i get 4 months to work on my return right

    /sarcasm
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  7. #7
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    nat that's a nice image. very fine in details and colors are great. i like how u highlight the hair. Though the part that covers her face down to her shoulder could need a tiny bit of texture as well. right now it's sort of completely black. i like how u did the wallpaper as well, i actually thought you manually painted it on. the texts are too small, maybe u could enlarge some letters so we can see nice swirl of the text. i think that could compliment with the woman's curve.

  8. #8
    Chaos silverx2's Avatar
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    just so you know, im bringing it hard nats. im about 25% of the way through my return.
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  9. #9
    Senior Member Planet's Avatar
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    so is this the battle to end all battles or what?

    Insane how the stars bleed through, Fantastic Nats!

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    ^ i need someone to confirm this too! before i pimp my camel and start another battle next week.

  11. #11
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    If you all have time to comment and "wait to see what happens", you have time to start some battles and pimp a few camels.

    @ Silver: I expect nothing less. Don't rush it though, the above image took me two days to complete. You wanted quality, hence the 4 day turn around.

  12. #12
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    Image walk through for Flashpipe:
    Just opened the PSD and I have no idea where to begin on this one...
    There are 25 layers in total, excluding paths and after merging elements.

    Bits that took the longest:
    Hair, fabric, lighting.

    Hair was the hardest to do, she has so many little streaks of blonde that faded into the background which made masking that lot a nightmare.
    I used three instances of masks to build the depth to it.
    1: Duplicated the R channel and uses "Select colour range" to give me my first rough mask
    2: Duplicated R channel and used the wand tool to select the highlights to preserve for later.
    3: Duplicated the R channel again and manually painted out a mask of the lighter feathered bits of her hair
    Once I had the selections I liked, I used the first mask to copy over her hair 3 or four times (I like preserving my original selections so that I can go back to them later if I need to).
    Dropped the huge / saturation all the way down to give myself a greyscale to work with.
    Used selection 3 to get rid of the rest of the background and clean up the selection.
    Duplicated that layer.
    Created a new layer between the two used selection 3 and filled that with an off black brown colour. Dropped the opacity to 70 and started erasing out the lowlights and highlights.
    Did this a few more times and kept refining the shape and depth.
    Used selection 2, changed the mode to "soft light" and refined my edges with the smudge tool until it blended with the rest of the hair.
    Merged all of that together.
    Created a new layer beneath her new dye-job, used a soft round brush, opacity to about 30% and started adding the little flecks of hair that I couldnt mask 100% back into it, so that it still looked soft.
    Merged.
    New layer: Added lowlights and shadows to her face, arms, torso and neck so that the light source looked reasonable.
    I ended up recreating the left side of her face so that the colours would blend smoothly.
    Which kinda p*ssed me off because I had spent a good hour on smoothing her skin out and bumping her colours earlier and IMO it makes that side of her face look flat.

    Fabric: You can see from the stock image that I kept the fabric at the base of her shoe and running along her leg.
    The rest:
    Duplicated the fabric selection and started using the paint brush and smudge tools to create elongated edges. I kept creating new layers and using the lassoo tool I filled in darker and lighter shades of the grey fabric to build shadow and depth, then merged and started using box blur to soften them without loosing my edges. The rest was done with the paint brush and smudge tools.
    After that, I took a colour swatch from her bra and created an overlay and a multiply layer to get the colour I wanted.
    Looks OK...I guess, but when printed out the blending is much more obvious.

    Ok so MUCH later after placement and background, take a step back and start looking at the shadows.
    The lighting on her hair said that the light source was coming from above with an omni glow to her right. So I used lighting effects to emphasize the light direction, and created one more adjustment layer to apply a burn to the outer lying edges of the image.
    Had to start creating shadows and lighting effects to balance that out with the background and the highlights.
    Standard way of doing that was to user her silhouette, fill that with a off black brown, multiply and blur... It didn't work. So I used it as a guide and went in there with brush tool to start brushing in my shadows. What was nice about doing that was the fact that it gives you a softer shadow, not one solid continuous depth. The chess board its pieces got the same treatment.
    And then I got sick of working on it.

    The end.

  13. #13
    supervillain gerbick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jujumon View Post
    ^ i need someone to confirm this too! before i pimp my camel and start another battle next week.
    Good work Nats. Love the colors, the manipulation of the color on the hair - I suspected such but that's a damn good job.

    Font placement, I'd say that you could have placed it higher up at the separation of the wall and padded parts. If you had stopped the stars at the wall, and punched up the brown leather a bit, you would have had a contrast point between the top part, the woman and the cloth. Now the cloth... I seriously couldn't have done better. Impressive and suits the picture well.

    The chess game though, I think that could have been worked in a bit better - some shadows just don't work right, imho. Or maybe it's the placement... something is off there. It "fits", but something minor is off... minor enough for me to know it was placed there.

    Would say that your additional shadows on the woman works well, but accentuates the light differences in some parts of the composition. Damn good image - you've grown tons.

    And Juju... no, this won't be the last battle. Continue on.

    [ Hello ] | [ gerbick ] | [ Ω ]

  14. #14
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    Awesome crit, shot a lot Gerbs
    I've got a lot more to learn about shadows and blending, tutorials, tutorials, tutorials.

  15. #15
    anyone else hear that? flashpipe1's Avatar
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    Nats,

    Thanks for the rundown...very helpful...duplicating a single color channel, eh? Nice trick...gotta play around with that a little.

    Always much more impressive to me when I find out exactly what it took to build something (esp. all the time with the hair...wow). Then, I go back and look at the source files and marvel at the things that were added/created that I would never know weren't in there originally (the fabric). I think that was my favorite part of the March madness this year.

    I feel vilified that Gerbs commented on the chess board too. Makes me happy that my artistic "eye" seems to be trainable to notice things like this...

    Looking forward to the return silver...
    Love like you've never been hurt, live like there's no tomorrow and dance like nobody's watching.

  16. #16
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    Out for weekend. See you in 2 days.

  17. #17
    Chaos silverx2's Avatar
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    im just about done. just going to sleep on it. something feels... missing.
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  18. #18
    Chaos silverx2's Avatar
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  19. #19
    supervillain gerbick's Avatar
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    The text approach is good, but I would have loved to have seem more of a propaganda approach - it's sorta flat at the moment and you're lacking something indeed. Also, pull your text beyond just skew... distort it so it looks like it's truly following vanishing points.

    There's a ton of white space that went unused and the American flag up top just doesn't work right. I would have loved it if you went with a full-opacity flag with shadows and whatnot and then used those shadows to create a bit of difference/deviation in the relatively flat background.

    The colors though, loving it. A pimp or rockstar to the left of the woman would have added to the picture - Ice-T from the album "Power" type of look would have been cool perhaps.

    Overall; it shows a ton of growth dude. I remember your earlier pieces too... and this is scores above that.

    [ Hello ] | [ gerbick ] | [ Ω ]

  20. #20
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    Can't view the image here, will check at home tonight & email the other stocks to myself.
    Can't wait to see this!

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