Jonathan,
The guy on the left needs a diffuse shadow on the ground under him, comparable to the shadow under the guy on the right. The trousers of the guy on the right have some illumination from the left, so the guy on the left needs some similar left illumination on the trousers.
— Burton —
how would you suggest i might add the illumination?
Yeah, the shadow is needed. You could either create one from scratch, but considering the similar stance and shoes for the left leg, you could clone or copy the guy’s foot from the right with the surrounding shadow included and apply it to the new guy. Same with the left pant leg. The lighting there doesn’t make it look pasted, but it would be a bit more believable and since the pants look the same, wrinkles and all, why not use the other guy’s pant leg? I’d just use the mid to upper part of the pant leg and blend it in with the rest with erasing or gradient fades. I can’t tell what you did for sure by the posted image, but it looks like you might have blurred the edges of the new guy’s frame too much. It’s noticable around the pants mostly. To blend in the edges, use the eraser with an airbrush, around size 7 on a 300ppi, not the blur tool. Zoom in close. Also, above the right elbow has a darkness that might be from the previous background, but it doesn’t blend in with the new. You’re almost there, just a few extra touches and it’ll baffle everyone.
I wanna know how he was able to upload the image here without a link. Can we ALL do that? That will change the face of the Forums, for sure!
Who needs the Basement repository!
Ol’Whozit,
Look at the source how he did it. It is not uploaded to the forum, it’s still a link.
Rob
It’s not uploaded to the forum, but the point is you should use the {a href=} tag and provide a hyperlink instead of forcing it on everyone with the {img src} tag. There’s still a lot of dial-up users out there.
The only other thing I can suggest is that the lines on the guy on the left look too hard.
If you used a lasso tool, maybe a little more feathering, and definatly use the shoe from the guy on the right, manipulate it and use it for the guy on the left. Use the lasso to outline the shoe, then ctrl-j to put the shoe on its own layer, then change it up a little so it doesn’t look exactly like the original.
Jonathan,
"How would you suggest I might add the illumination?"
In Photoshop there are usually several ways to do something. I like to keep my separate activities on separate Layers. If you happen to have the "knockout" of your client’s image on a Layer of its own, that will simplify adding a touch of illumination to the figure’s pant legs without messing up the background.
I have had some experience doing amateur painting so I would probably just manually use the Dodge tool, with a suitably sized brush, to lighten the left edges a bit to add the illumination, as if I were painting the image. I would probably choose Airbrush on the Brushes palette and, since the pants edges on the figure are fairly dark, I would choose the Dodge tool’s Range as Midtones or Shadows (Highlights probably wouldn’t be suitable here.)
Another way to do the illumination would be to make sure just the knockout layer is active (the brush icon in the Layers palette) and menu select Filter> Render> Lighting Effects and for Light Type choose "Spotlight" and experiment with everything including the Properties sliders and also play with the orientation and size of the spotlight ellipse. Before you do this, you might want to make a copy of the knockout layer and work on the copy. When in doubt, I always make another Layer.
The image you sourced is necessarily quite small at 708 x 454 pixels, so when you print your larger image there may be some surprises that don’t show up on the small image. Mike Marketello’s comment that "the lines on the guy on the left look too hard" may be valid and that might show up more noticeably on a print.
Your knockout seems to be quite accurate, but the edges may be a little "hard". If your knockout is on a layer of its own, you could soften its edges a touch by brushing them softly with the Eraser tool or making a Selection and Feathering it. I am sure there are other ways, like maybe Quick Mask.
I use Corel’s Knockout to do knockouts because it automatically softens the edges a bit, in accord with it’s motto, "There are no edges, there are only transitions."
After you get the final composition looking quite convincing, there is one last thing I would do. Apply a little noise to simulate the look of film grain. Filter> Noise> Add Noise and check the Preview box. Also, before you do that, change your Zoom to 100% because if you are looking at your overall image instead of the Preview box you will get a distorted view of noise if it scaled to something less than 100%.
I process a lot of noisy digital images and, ironically, after I use Neat Image to eliminate CCD noise and/or JPEG artifacts, I usually add a little noise as a finishing touch. I prefer the look of the Uniform noise distribution to the Gaussian distribution. Of course, I have upscaled the image a lot during my work on the image, so when I am adding noise it is much finer grained than the noise I removed. I think a little noise makes an image look more "real".
— Burton —
Ol’Whozit,
We strongly discourage embedding images in messages, especially in the first message of a topic.
I have changed the embedded image to a link in this Topic.
That’s what I thought, Len. I wondered if it was a fluke or something "new" on the boards…
