| » Forum Index » The Friday Challenge » Topic: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia |
|
Posted on 17/08/18 08:36:00 AM |
|
David Asch
Tech Support Posts: 1913 Reply  |
Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
I visited friends in the village of Fortia, Spain, some months ago. I was struck by this rather splendid decoration, featuring an iron silhouette of a horse and cart, with two splendid trees. Unfortunately, it was cloudy for the whole few days I was there. Can you bring the sun out? High res is here. 
_________________ It must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays |
Posted on 17/08/18 09:37:28 AM |
|
Mariner
Renaissance Mariner Posts: 3124 Reply  |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Rubbish. Deleted. |
Posted on 17/08/18 09:49:34 AM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply  |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Yes. The horses look like two flat cut-outs with a real wagon. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 09:51:07 AM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Now you've deleted your comment Mariner my reply looks like nonsense.  _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 11:19:19 AM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Easy way out of a tricky challenge. So simple it's close to cheating ....... ...... but I call it creative pragmatism.   _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 11:31:47 AM |
|
Mariner
Renaissance Mariner Posts: 3124 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Sorry David, your reply did not exist when I delected my stupid comment. |
Posted on 17/08/18 11:34:23 AM |
|
Mariner
Renaissance Mariner Posts: 3124 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
David, your sunrise/sunset is an amazingly quick but effective result! |
Posted on 17/08/18 11:37:07 AM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Perfect overlap - you deleted while I was typing my reply.  _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 12:59:03 PM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Taken by the book, as I have done, this is not an easy challenge to try and pull off. Very hard to be convincing. 
I think this needs an approach that is lateral minded rather than literal minded ........  _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 4:43:01 PM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
WARNING - IMAGE CONTAINS GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE! Well that's me done for the week. Too much idle time today ........  _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 5:03:41 PM |
|
lwc
Hole in One Posts: 3320 Reply  |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
You've gone wild David... all good! 
|
Posted on 17/08/18 5:06:56 PM |
|
lwc
Hole in One Posts: 3320 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Partly cloudy with intermittent sun and variable winds... 
Mine are mules instead of horses... |
Posted on 17/08/18 5:44:32 PM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Love the gentle movements. Especially the palm. Shame about the bump. I know virtually nothing about animation beyond common sense but can't you 'rock and roll it'? With this kind of movement I would imagine that you wouldn't sense the direction changes. For all the movement this is very 'painterly'. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 17/08/18 7:35:29 PM |
|
lwc
Hole in One Posts: 3320 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
The dreaded "bump" is an issue with the software. Many FX such as smoke and fog are the worst. I used Steve's 30-70% fix on the one posted above, it does help but not quite enough. If I understand what you mean by 'rock and roll it', it helps with some FX but not all. I have tried the reversing technique before, in some cases it is much worse than the 'bump-jump'. One has to be careful and not make the birds fly backwards... Fortunately many of the effects that I use do not have a 'bump' at all. I make a lot of FX from 'scratch' and normally don't have to worry about those.
This is a modified version of the first one posted... it now has a different type of bump when it reverses. In this case it isn't that bad, but still noticeable. More apparent in the grass than the tree. Sadly the animation went from 16mb up to 22mb. Going from a 16 million available color jpg down to a 256 color gif doesn't help the resolution much either...
If I misunderstood your term 'rock and roll', let me know... as always I am most anxious to try anything that anyone can suggest to fix the 'bumps'. |
Posted on 17/08/18 11:04:16 PM |
|
lwc
Hole in One Posts: 3320 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
 |
Posted on 18/08/18 12:16:07 PM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
No you didn't misunderstand. As you correctly surmised it's basically a way of 'looping' an animation (or live action) by reversing the same piece of footage so front and end match each other. Most usually used for comedic effect. Obviously, if the reversal is not to be visible, it needs motions that are by their nature cyclic or lacking in a dominant direction like fronds blowing back and forth. I though in the case of your image this might be applicable but, looking at the second example it would appear that I am wrong! _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 18/08/18 9:58:29 PM |
|
GKB
Magical Montagist Posts: 4033 Reply  |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
A very quick one this week as I don't have much time. I reckoned that the residents might be quite happy with this after the extremely hot summer that they have been having.  _________________ Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana. |
Posted on 19/08/18 07:09:15 AM |
|
Mariner
Renaissance Mariner Posts: 3124 Reply |
Sunny Day in Fortia
 |
Posted on 19/08/18 10:00:08 AM |
|
DavidMac
Director of Photoshop Posts: 5776 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
One of the things about this challenge is that it looked like quite a tricky selection for sky replacement. I was quite nervous about it. In the end I found was able to do it very quickly indeed by simple application of high contrast to a copy of the blue channel using Levels. A wee bit of hand painting and that was that! Trying to refine this further with Refine Mask simply went downhill. So I simply left it as it was. A classic technique I haven't used for a while now. Curious to know whether others found this challenging and how they did it. _________________ The subtlety and conviction of any Photoshop effect is invariably inversely proportional to the number of knobs on it ....... |
Posted on 19/08/18 3:45:01 PM |
|
Mariner
Renaissance Mariner Posts: 3124 Reply |
Re: Challenge 719: No sun in Fortia
Normally I manage to stretch the FC out until Thursday morning but this one was easier than most and I had finished it by Saturday evening. The most interesting part was extracting the land, especially the palm tree. First I copied the whole image and used Layer / New Adjustment Layer / Black & White to change the sky as far as possible to white, and the rest, as far as possible, to black. Then I set the foreground palette to black and using a large, very soft, very transparent brush in Overlay mode I painted over the spiky edges of the palm leaves and the almost invisible edges of the bushes to make them stand out more. With the Magic Wand set to Not Contiguous and with a tolerance of about 60 it was possible to select the most difficult parts of the skyline. Switching off the B&W layer and using the selection on the original layer made for quite a good extraction. The palm tree selection still had issues with white edges, but these could mainly be fixed, for example by using a soft brush set to Darken with an appropriate colour and painting over the edges. At this stage a more attractive result could be obtained by duplicating the leaves of the palm tree, setting the mode to Overlay, then reducing the opacity a bit. If you want the very fine branches of the other bushes to look natural you need to pick a sky which fades to near-white on the horizon so that the branches don’t need to be perfectly extracted. |
| page: 1 2 3 last |