I was honestly a little bitter after some of the comments I received, but I'm over it now & I appreciate all the opinions expressed here!
I'm not 100% sure why I did this image like this - maybe I felt inspired by my trip out to California this month. My gig out there involved interviewing John Knoll (one of the co-creators of Photoshop) and Rob Coleman (George Lucas' animation director). I spent a few days at Lucas Film/Lucas Arts/ILM's main campus and also got to tour SkyWalker Ranch & Big Rock Ranch - maybe all that sci-fi & talent put me in the mood to do this...
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This is a collage of 6 images The original background image is this one:
(before editing)
(after editing)
After editing it (which was just some simple layer duplication overlay/screen blending modes & some adjustment layers of levels, curves & selective color), the image looked to me almost like some fantasy scene & I immediately thought how neat it might look if the silhouette of a dragon were up in that blood red sky. I'm not some fantasy freak, the thought just struck me as an interesting project & I banked the idea away as a possibility for the Expert Editing Free Study.
Well, the night before the challenge, I decided to run with the idea so I grabbed one of my kid's toy dragons & set up a little cyclorama on my kitchen island. To make a long story short, I ended up also shooting a Star Wars action figure for the wizard character & adding San Francisco's Coit Tower & a ski slope from Brekenridge, CO (both of which I shot this month while on various work assignments). The 'magik' is a handful of lights from the Golden Gate bridge - the long exposures I did on the bridge turned the lights into spiky balls. Here are those images:
It should be noted that although I drew from a number of different images for this composition, I didn't use any 'painterly' type effects to make this look the way it does. In fact, with the exception of the 'wizard's magic', I didn't use any special effects filters whatsoever. Everything was accomplished with adjustment layers, blending modes, dodging/burning and lighting my subjects in such a way as to mimic the light already present in the image they were to be composited into. I did do some cloning on the base of the Coit Tower in order to remove some Japanese tourists and also did some perspective correction on it as well. Only the magic required a filter, but even that was just photoshop's 'twirl' effect.
I love it. This is awful to see images like this miss out on higher scores, because they're almost digital art?
And...maybe I'm going a bit too far by saying this, but personally, I'm not sure I understand why people get upset over "digital art" images. I think that expert editing challenges voters should be open to the digal art stuff. Just because it isn't strictly photographic in nature doesn't negate the fact that it's a beautiful, shining image... Photoshop editing is a skill, too, right?? :)
But anyways, stunning image. I love all the layers of colors, elements, and I guess I am a sucker for fantasy-type stuff on top of it all. Keep up the excellent work! :)
Its too busy for my liking, there's too much to be looking at, but a 7 nonetheless. well done. Your photoshop skills are certainly way more advanced than mine :-( Lol.
Sorry, looks too much like a cartoon or painting for my taste but still gave a 5 wich is good from me who usually hates digital art images here at DPC.
Interesting, but looks a bit too unrealistic for my taste as a "photograph". I imagine this would do well as a poster however. Nice work on the graphics end of this.
A little bit too cartoonish - don't think that I hate expert editing, I have an image in the race, too - I just thought that this might have been even better with e.g. more noise. This way is too clean.
Excellent photoshop skills - no doubt about that. But to me this is an example on why I don't think expert editing belongs at DPC. Imo this is not longer photography but digital art and belongs more on sites like Deviantart than here.
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