Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Profile photo

Thanks to all the blogs about SL, I discovered that people use and overuse a photoshop technique to enhance photos they publish on flickr. Yes I know, I am dumb, but I can't know everything about everything :).
This magic filter is diffuse glow. I used it yesterday on the midian picture I took and you can see it is pretty effective to 'dramatize' a photograph.
So today, I try that on a profile picture project I started with a friend. To preserve her privacy (she might not appreciate I publish 'tortured' visuals of her face), I will name our subject 'Viola' :).
The aim is to create for her not only one profile picture but a set of different profile pics expressing several moods.
Needless to mention she had to sell an eye and half a kidney to pay me for that.
Today, we'll try to express a bit of mistery with our subject.
Lets' start with a photo! The lady gets her fav clothes, jewelry, tat, makeup on....
ok , shoot!
All right, pretty decent picture. I took it as I liked the neutral face expression and the 'evasive' eye direction. We can then ask ourselves 'What is she looking at? a friend? An enemy? Is there danger?'.
The idea of mistery is more present because of the background behind. The screen and the cushion make a colorful composition that is not obvious.
We will separate them from the foreground with some nice blur.
Then, we will put some lighting to strenghten light direction and highlight our subject (aka international feale of mistery).
FInally a bit of diffuse glow to turn Viola into a source of light that will attract our eye.
There.
In blog life, it took one minute and two lines. In Photoshop life, it took a bit more :).
Auto-criticism: diffuse glow gives a boost to the face, that's a fact. It almost makes the face 'surreal'. The bad side of such work is that it 'burns' the skin a bit, as Windlight (booh) does. I also enhanced the hair, the original was too dark to me.
Still, I think we now have a pretty good picture of Mata Hari asking herself how she could get more secrets from this austrian-hungarian ambassador.
To be continued...

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