Hints and Help With Photoshop and Model

[Modelling_Mushi]

Hello all

I want to start putting pictures of my models into photos as I have seen others do, I have a copy of photoshop and have had a play round with one of my earlier builds, getting the result as below:



I took a stock clouds photo and added a layer to it, then pasted in a cropped pic of my Hawker Penguin model I did a while ago. I gave her a bit of a tilt and then used a blur function behind the pipe on the background to try and show a heat haze. Made a new layer and pasted the same cropped pic of the Penguin in, scaled it down to 40% and shifted it up and tilted it. I was trying to show 2 aircraft banking away from the camera. I then used auto levels and auto contrast which seemed to help blend it all in, and then converted it from a colour to a greyscale photo.

So to those who do this well, what sort of things would you have done, and what are the things I should be doing or looking for to improve?

My apologies if this is the wrong area to post, I had a burrow around and could not find anywhere, nearest Ic ould come was the CGI / Profiles area which didnt seem to suit.

Ciao

Mass

[pyro-manic]

It looks good to me! A thing to watch for is the direction of the light source - they need to match up between the background and the subject.

[puddingwrestler]

Seconded. You can do the most amazing effects but still fail if the light sources are wrong.
Try having a squiz at www.worth1000.com, it's a photochoppinh website with frequent competitions. THere are also plenty of tutorials on there which would be very useful - including how to transform a photo of a leopard into a photo of a leopard made from carbon fibre... (atleast last time I looked)

[Gary]

Also remember that inherently, photos tend towards imperfections where as Photoshop work tends toward perfection. By this I mean that your subject in real life would be in motion, blurred, the more distant one, even more blurred. Research is your key if you want to create a realistic fake. When I used to teach photo editing I used to tell my students to get as many reference photos as exist during the time frame you are trying to represent. Many older cameras had fixed f-stop settings or used a higher speed film to compensate for issues related to the speed at which the subjects were being photographed. Looking at lenses from the time and seeing the distortion furthers the believability. Anyone who has made the painful transformation from film to digital photography will tell you that for several years, getting true depth of field control was hard as blazes and it prevented photographers like me from transitioning to digital. Even today, the inherent nature of digital photography, the camera makes far too many fixes and corrections, making the imagery rather unnatural.
Looking at the style of aircraft you have I would imagine it flying in the time of the Banshee, the middle 50's. Find some inflight photos and a magnifying glass and study what imperfections exist in the photos. You would be astonished to realize what the brain will accept as a fantastic image after you study a photo's imperfections.