Liz Vicious

woody222 · Poster Joined: 23 Apr 2007 Posts: 16

Here's another simple one I tried...and thanks to the Grumpy One and others for sharing their secrets.

flarejet · Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 8:28 pm Post subject:

Good post. With Grumpy One help on hair it makes it look better. Keep up the good work.

GrumpyOne · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 12:30 am Post subject: Re: Liz Vicious

woody222 · Poster Joined: 23 Apr 2007 Posts: 16

Thanks for all the detailed info Grumpy, I will have to keep practicing. Your techniques give a nice glamour look to the hair. To be fair, I picked a bad photo for wallpapering, it was an outdoor shot and she had very stiff, unnatural looking hair to begin with. I'm now playing with a masking plugin called Fluid Mask http://www.vertustech.com/ , my main use is for family and pet photos where I can make the cutout exactly like the original. Thanks for taking the time to help, it's really appreciated!

GrumpyOne · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 3:51 pm Post subject: Fluidmask

jackthemanc · Poster Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 7

You can't beat simply taking your time... and practice.

Make a wallpaper. If it's not great, delete it and start again. Each tme you do it you'll get better. Try "all" of the different brushes and filters to get the best effect.

The hair is better in the first image, it's a little too transparent in the second. The edge is a little soft, sometimes this works but only if it's intentional. The final cut out is also slightly soft, could do with a sharpening filter.

Don't just set out to make a wallpaper for us miserable gits to pick over. We will point out every flaw, but that's good. Do it because you like to do it and want to improve. I don't care if you have twenty tries at the same wallpaper before posting, it's time well spent.

jackthemanc · Poster Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 7

Sorry Grumpy, didn't realise you had done the second one. Didn't take enough time to properly read through the other replies. I think my comments still stand though. I'm surprised you didn't sharpen her yourself considering the crispness of the background you created.

GrumpyOne · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 11:41 pm Post subject: Comments

GrumpyOne · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 7:11 pm Post subject: Further comments

My apologoes to Woody222 for hijacking his thread. I just wanted to post some examples that explain where I am coming from.

Image01 - What I have done here is to show a full-size image from Met_Art and from TeenFuns. I have also shown two frame sizes that I usually use in my wallpapers. 1600 x 1200 pixels and 1280 x 1024 pixels.

The Met-Art needs to be reduced to fit the frame, while the TeenFuns image needs to be enlarged. The maximum quality one can get comes from the full size image. The software has algorithms to resize the images and with pixel based images there will always be a loss of quality. This quality loss is much more noticeable when you enlarge an image.

Image02 - I have taken both images and scaled them to roughly the same size on a 1600 x 1200 frame. The lower quality is easy to see on the TeenFuns image.

Image03 - I have applied a background layer with a fill pattern at 100%. The background looks sharp and the foreground image is not as sharp. The two images just don't seem quite right together. You can clearly see some of the artifacts from the process that created the jpg image.

Image04 - I have applied a sharpen filter to this image. The image does look more sharp, but not more natural. The compression artifacts have been enhanced by the sharpen filter.

Image05 - The larger image and background have the same relative sharpness, and don't look too bad. The only problem is that it still looks like the image was cut out with scissors and pasted onto the background. If you magnify any figure and look at where the foreground and background meet, there is a slight softness there.

Image06 - I attempt to simulate this softness by duplicating the image, apply a slight gaussian blur to it and reduce the opacity to soften where the foreground and background meet. A bonus of using this technique in a studio shot using a kicker light sees a slight enhancement. A kicker light is a small light that is aimed at the back of the subject. You get a bit of a glow around the subject where the light hits.

Image07 - I have softend the background a bit to similate the depth of field that you get in a photograph. A 0.9 pixel Guassian blur applied to the background of Image06 gives the forground image a bit more "punch".

I guess it really depends on what you are trying to do with a wallpaper. To some extent, I am trying to get my wallpapers to have a bit of a photographic quality. That is why I tend to go for a softer,more blended look that some of the other contributers here.

The Grumpy One

GrumpyOne