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Comments
I like the colours! And, again, your use of PS filters, eventhough I ususally don't love filters. You have a knack for it!
Thanks. I love emulating the look of traditional paint media (I also paint), and Photoshop has a lot of great tools to do that (Filters, actions, combinations of both). A lot of what I do when I polish my renders, or composite Daz figures with stock photography, is designed to work well with that in mind. And Daz is GREAT for that- tools such as Canvases that make it easy to export selections and subsections of your composition make complex postwork SO MUCH EASIER.
Book covers in the fantasy, scifi, urban fantasy genres, particularly, when you work with indie authors and smaller publishers, it's all about emulating the prestige look of larger traditional publishers who can afford expensive, hand-done illustrations by people who are way more experienced and skilled than me. I started as a traditional artist, performer, and model for photography, so that is where my vocabulary is. I'm still building my vocabulary on the Daz side, but having the tools in other areas does help, since it's easier to blend my creativity in to more established frameworks of vocabulary, and gradually push the bounds of what I don't know, as far as the complexity and capabilities of the software. But I'm continually testing new techniques on several fronts, depending on the project. Every image brings its own challenges.
Filters can be really useful for smoothing over some of the uncanny valley oddities in generated images, if you are careful, especially if you have composited multiple images together (like photoshopping flames in, as opposed to posing them in using some of the flame packs available in the Daz store). It's a matter of tweaking settings, and adjusting carefully, and being prepared to go back and smooth out any rough edges that emerge in the final filter that were not visible in the previous image. Of course, that, too, depends on the image. One of my favorite recent images, I can't post to the daz forums because the figures are technically naked, though it's not detailed enough to see bits (they're dancing, and fairly far away). (Mods, if it's not okay to link the image, please LMK and I'll delete the link). But as you can see, on this one, I left the seams between the tiled render JUST harsh enough that when I ran the filter, it couldn't quite erase them. Ordinarily, I would redo- in this case, I kept it, because it added to the feeling of seeing the dancers distorted/flipped/reflected through a gemstone's facets. The filter REALLY added to the complexity of the image, as did Daz's flexibility in posing. (In many images where it is thematically appropriate, I use Daz to simulate disabled models, like myself, who have conditions causing hypermobility in joints. This enables me to represent a wider degree of biodiversity without actually endangering a real person, since people with my medical condition are generally advised NOT to show off our severe hypermobility, lest we worsen the condition causing it.)
Random render for one of the forum contests. Post processing is limited to some color-correction and a filter over the final.