Games Production

For this mock idea I decided to focus more on something that could potentially sell well on a website like Bigstockphoto, as my previous idea was only really experimenting with light etc, it's unlikely anyone would buy it or be able to use it for something.
After researching on bigstockphoto it looked like even very simple images of water sell fairly well, the most popular being simple water droplets or photos of fairly clear and calm water.

As I already had a set of photos I decided to use what I had rather than going out and taking more to copy more popular examples. Also, submitting my current images would be a bit of a waste, as I hadn't done anything particularly clever with them in Photoshop, apart from changing the light levels and saturation.
I experimented a bit with the few images I had, and decided to combine several of the water photos and add certain effects to see how it would come out.

Starting with this image, I cut the top off and duplicated it several times so I had 3 of the same image. After inverting one of them I erased most of the left hand side of the image with a soft brush so it would match up better. Next, I used the Warp tool to distort it so it looks almost like there were waves and aligned the two images better.

This gave the photo a slightly stretched effect, but it's barely noticable and in a way makes it look more realistic because there is more space between the waves. Also the distortion makes it less obvious that it's the same image that's been duplicated.
After putting the finishing touches (blurring and use of the smudge tool) to make it look more realistic, I did the same on the left hand side of the image. With this one I did not invert the photo horizontally, so I just erased out the black water at the bottom right, as it would be hard to restore it to its original colour.

I distorted this until I was satisfied with it, then cropped the whole photo down to get rid of the unnecessary parts of the image that were too heavily distorted, like at the top. After this I used the perspective tool to make it seem like there was a more visible focal point, which almost makes it look like an image of the sea like I was aiming for.

Next, I took one of my other water photos and selected an area to add into the main image. Once I had copied it across I distorted it using the warp and perspective tools to fit the shape of the main image, and set the layer style to Linear Burn as it gave added texture to the water.

I also thought i'd try to get a reflection of something in the water to make it more interesting, and looking through my photos I decided to use a photo of some clouds. I made a selection and feathered it so it would blend better and copied it to my main image.

Even after changing the blending style to something that looked realistic like Pin Light and setting the opacity to 70%, it still didn't look right. The main problem was the that clouds weren't distorted enough, so they looked like they were just laying over the top of the waves, rather than being slightly distorted by them.
To fix this I applied a "Plastic Wrap" filter to the clouds which gave the layer a more defined texture, and also "Ocean Ripple" distortion. Usually I don't like using these types of Photoshop effects because it makes it feel less like my own work because they're just automated effects, but this wasn't exactly my final piece so I used them anyway.

Somewhere along the way I also duplicated the main water layer and set the new layer to multiply to give it a better contrast and colour. I also decided to apply a light plastic wrap filter to it as well which helped make the waves more visible, as the detail was becoming lost amongst all the other layers I had on top.
After this I added a few more effects, improving the lighting/highlights by adjusting the light levels and using the burn/dodge tools, and came up with this final image.

Obviously, this couldn't be submitted to bigstockphoto because the perspective is a bit distorted and the image is not complete. But it did help give me ideas for my final submission.

This week's workshop was focusing only on the assignment that's due in on the 6th November. Following the previous test photos and mock idea I still wasn't sure if I wanted to submit any of them as a final piece, so I went outside with my camera during the workshop and began work on my second mock idea.
For this I decided to use water as a primary focus in the image, so I got several different photos and returned to edit them in Photoshop. After looking at them, several could be immediately deleted as they were grainy, noisy and beyond repair. I decided to keep 4 of the best for later use. These were mostly undersaturated and had lighting problems, and in many of them there leaves in the water so these had to be edited out.

The following images are comparisons between the original photo and the final photoshopped version, but have been resized for display and upload limit purposes:

This photo was a test to see how the water would look if it was not directly focused on it, and therefore wasn't as detailed. This would be useful in future simply as a layer mask if water in another photo needed extra texturing. In this photo the light levels have been adjusted and the saturation increased.

This photo is deliberately oversaturated and has a very high contrast. This is because I only intend to use this photo for the water, so the sky, buildings and general lighting can be disregarded. A mild cooling filter has been added to this photo to make the water look as if it is reflecting a clear blue sky, and this has its advantages over simply increasing the saturation, as there is no chance that artefacts or noise will appear.

In this photo I have greatly increase the saturation, added a cooling filter and adjusted the light balance to make the image look more appealing. For example, you can see at the lower right of each photo that the darkness levels have been adjusted so blacks appear darker, and a similar effect has been applied to the whites. I think this gives the photo a more professional look, as there are examples of both extremes (perfect white and perfect black) in the image.

After experimenting with the above images during the workshop I continued the work at home, and put togther a second mock idea that could be used as a final submission.

For the final image I wanted a type of lighting that was completely different from the previous two.

Lighting 3 - A moonlit night

In this image I decided to take nearly all lighting out, and then add my own for the moonlight. To achieve this, I firstly painted over the sunspot at the top of the photo because there would obviously be no sun in this photo. Next I altered the light levels to reflect the amount of light that would be visible at midnight, which was basically nothing so the darkness levels were increased a lot.

To give the main look that the path was being lit by moonlight, I created a new layer with a dark-light blue gradient and set the layer settings to "Overlay". This was a bit too intense so I reduced the opacity of the layer to 80% and changed the brightness.
After this I changed the light levels of the leaves in the foreground and several of the buildings in the background so they were a bit brighter, then using the Hue/Saturation options I increased the saturation to +20, with "Blues" selected because I didn't want it to affect all the RGB layers. This made it look a lot more realistic because the parts that were already bright in the image stayed the same brightness but had a blue tint as if it were being lit by blue moonlight.
Next I decided to put the moon in the place where the sun had been, so I found some old photos I had of the moon and created that as a new layer. After changing the Shadows/Highlights options, I made the moon appear brighter than it first was to give the illusion that it was giving off a lot of light. I also duplicated the layer and gave it a blue Hue and set the layer options to Multiply, which created the effect of a "blue moon".

Finally, a cooling filter and moon beams were added to the whole image so the lighting appeared more natural and the filter balanced all the light levels in the image so nothing appeared over or underlit.
The final image has been scaled down to fit the page, so quality has been lost as well. The original, full resolution image will be on the CD when it is submitted.

After finishing the first image that focused on lighting at midday I moved onto my second image.

Lighting 2 - A vivid sunset

For this second image I wanted to create the feel of a sunset, which was not at all easy because for a start the sun was in the wrong place for a sunset. However, since the main point of creating these images was to be experimenting with lighting, rather than editing scenery in a photo, I decided to leave the sun where it was and work around it. The only downside to this is obviously that it meant the final photo did not look as realistic as a real sunset.
Since the image was not going to look realistic anyway, I decided to make the colours and lighting a lot more vivid and intense that it would usually, just for the purpose of making the photo more appealing.
The main aim of this photo was to be a lot darker than the first, allowing me to bring out shadows and detail that I originally edited out of the daytime image. Firstly I removed all the colour from much of the foreground such as the leaves, and changed the light levels to make them appear a lot darker. I think this made the image a lot stronger as there was now a heavy contrast between the dark leaves and the bright sunbeams breaking through them.
I decided to include the original clouds in this photo as well because a plain sky didn't look particularly interesting when compared to the rest of the photo.
Several simple orange-yellow gradients were added with the layers set to Color and Linear Burn, as these gave the impression that the ground was being lit by this colour, rather than being heavily masked.
This technique works a lot better than simply changing the Hue of the original image, because it applies the colours differently depending on the RGB levels, rather than just shifting the colour along the spectrum, causing some colours to become distorted and creating artefacts/noise.
Finally, several more layers were added with orange-yellow/red-yellow gradients around the sun, which gave the sun the burning effect that you usually see at sunset when it is lower in the sky. Several cleanup layers were created which I used to go over the whole image a last time and make any small changes to lighting or to blur anything that looked noisy or grainy. The final image has again been scaled down to fit the page:

Continuing from Part 1, I now had a single image that was very large in size and very good quality. At this point I decided on the final part of my first idea, which would be experimenting heavily with lighting. For this first mock idea I would create 3 different images from the one I had just created, representing different times of the day. These would be the following:

Lighting 1 - A typical bright sunny day.

This meant a clear blue sky without any clouds, few shadows, and generally a fairly bright and warm looking photo. Looking back this was most likely the easiest of the three, for the main reason that the photo was taken around midday, so the lighting was already fairly close to what I was aiming for.
To achieve this desired look, I first cleared up the clouds in the photo using a mixture of the Eraser and Healing Brush tools both set to very low softness. This was obviously because when dealing with clouds it looks more realistic if there is a soft edge.
After this I decided to work on the heavy shadows particularly on the brick wall and pathway as these were too dark for what I was aiming for. These were easily changed using the "Shadow/Highlight" tool and by adjusting the light levels. This made the photo a lot brighter and meant that much more detail was visible, particularly the bricks on each side of the railings.
Finally, I created several more layers and used these to increase the sun's brightness and contrast, for example, a yellow circle placed on top of the sun with the layer set to "Color Burn" created the impression that the surrounding leaves were being heavily lit by the sun's brightness. After applying this effect and many others to various buildings and other parts of the photo that needed extra lighting, I added a weak warming filter to the whole image which gave the photo the look I wanted. The final image has been scaled down a lot to fit the size of this page, and has lost a bit of quality as well. The original resolution image will be included on the CD when it is handed in though: