28/05/19 - 02/07/19 (Week 9 - Week 14)
Piyaphon Inthavong (0337589)
Digital Photography and Imaging
Final Project
Recompose Surrealism
May 28th, 2019Project - The Chosen Artist
The instructions of the exercise were to choose a surrealism artwork by an artist given in a list and recompose the whole artwork with stock images.
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| Bad day - by beeple crap. This is the surrealistic art piece I chose to recreate as my for my final project. |
Gathering resources
Progressions
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| Progress 1. Selection preparation for the insect monster |
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| Progress 1.5. Preparing the human figure |
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| Progress 2. Few images were placed after their selections have been finished. |
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| Progress 2.5. Placing the cropped mountain image and the background as a color trial. |
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| Progress 3. Placing the secondary mountain to the artwork; The mountains are adjusted with "Hue and saturation" to match the color of the mountain and the ground, which is originally a desert. The tone curve is then used to correct the lighting and the shadows, follow up by final touch of the Level adjustment. |
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| Progress 4. Further Level adjustment is applied in order to darken the mountain so that it looks further behind. The ground layer is then adjusted with multiple adjustment layers such as "Hue and Saturation," color balance, and tone curve. The color match feature was also used for all images in this stage, this is to make the composition look as close to each other as possible in terms of color. Lastly, a dark background was added as seen with the bright one (progress 2.5) which doesn't work as smoothly. |
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| Progress 5. I felt like the initial monster is not making as much impact to the composition as a whole, the positioning, and angle of the image itself did not feel right. Not to mention the insect monster not being scary enough to the viewers as it looks too sketchy at first glance (it is an illustration after all). The cropping and selection process is done with the quick selection and refine edge tool. |
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| Progress 5.5. It is a little complex as seen in the image to make use of this sand monster to balance it and blend its' element with the whole composition. I was initially worried about not being able to make use of this cool monster as it is lacking lots of details and lighting but I did not stop. |
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| Progress 6. This is the process where monstrous adjustments were made. To describe the process briefly "Hue and saturation" was firstly used to adjust the colors, although the feature lacks the ability to get to the right colors, the tone curve was the secret to fix the poor lighting problem, and the level adjustment came next. Further adjustment layers (color lookup, selective color, channel mixer) were then utilized in order to achieve the desired look. In the end, various types of fog were added to further create a mysterious feel for the artwork. |
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| Progress 7. With a little understanding to digital light and shadow, I did some manual retouch using the most basic brush tool and the blending options to draw the "missing" light and shadow to the monster and the human figure. Light source was also added to the left side of the artwork with the Photoshop prime lens flare. |
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| 90% Progress of project 1. To finalize the whole composition, additional elements were added to build up the dramatic atmosphere to the artwork composition, this includes the birds (scared, flying away from the monster), clouds and the windy sky (intense scenery build-up, a preface perhaps), and the snow (there's a reason for the man to hide his hands behind the pockets, and an additional narrative description for such kind of monsters to live in a very cold area, an uncommon area such as the hidden mountains). |
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| Final outcome of the recomposed surrealism piece. To match the feel of the chosen surrealism, I adjusted several filters to create the green ambient to the artwork, bring more colors and added spider web to bottom the monster. The spider web was adjusted with right distortion, skewing and perspective transform tool. |
I strongly believe that the software Photoshop has the ability to craft all kinds of images if creativity and imagination are present (of course this includes the knowledge and practices of skill-sets being incorporated accordingly with the right understanding to its tools).
Animation on surrealism
June 25th, 2019Project
First I converted the final composition in Photoshop into flat layers because After Effect is unable to import adjustment layers directly from Photoshop (resulting in a minor color difference to the animation file); My initial plan was to animate the background and world particles such as snow, fog, clouds and birds flying away from the monster. |
| The snow animation is generated using Adobe After Effect's built-in simulation effect, CC Particle World. The rest of the work is done with the settings on the left hand side panel; This includes the physics, axis and gravity of the particles, colors, birth rate - death rate, transition, way more to list. |
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| I decided to create a very subtle movement for the fog; I applied basic key frames such as scale, position, and opacity so that they have a little movement from left to right, scaling in variety sizes and slowly disappears. |
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| The sky and clouds animation is a nice addition to the final outcome as it makes the entire composition alive even with minor edit. |
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| Truly one of the most time-consuming process of this animation. The birds has to be flapping its' wings, that means each of the wings has to be edited, one by one with the puppet tool. To not make the birds look dull, there were variation of flapping time, flying direction and speed. |
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| The movement of the monster was created using the Puppet tool by holding Alt and moving the selected anchor points. The movement was then edited later by expanding into the puppet pin until the desired result. |
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| Another minimal detail such as the monster's dripping saliva adds realism to moving monster. |
The final animation mainly consist of subtle movements, the frightened birds gives one of the most impact to the animation as a whole, but seeing almost everything in the photo moving already makes it feel lively and real to some point.