I'm working on an image for a contest and would really appreciate several looking over and giving some constructive critique. Thanks in advance!

clickhere (http://www.greatyellowpageads.us/WORTH)

Without some idea of the contest rules and criteria, I don't know what to say other than -- cool.

You could also ask for a private critique on the site that you are entering the image to you know. ;) It looks very good but perhaps try match the textures in the armour to the mask or some of the gold edging? As it is right now the mask seems a little too smooth. What about showing the muscles in his rib cage through the armour too?

I think we'd need to know whether it's an 'open-ended' contest with a 'Dark Knight' Batman theme, or whether you were supposed to seamlessly integrate those two specific photos. Personally, I don't know that a Rembrandt (or whatever Dutch master's painting that is) image and George Clooney as Batman go together all that well, but baybe that's the point. That being said, the bat head is too big, making him look odd, and the lighting on the head doesn't really match the shot. If you tried making a newly designed metallic bat headpiece that picked up on the design style of the rest of the suit of armour, I think that it would be more convincing. The fit of the logo on top of the armour doesn't see to work physically; it's not centered on the chest, and it interferes with the shoulder cuff.

Rembrant lighting, if memory serves correctly is 5:1, not Black to 1. You've completely lost the stage left side of batman's face.

I agree with two earlier observations:
1. The head is too large.
2. It would be very cool to morph Batman's muscular torso into the torso amour.. what's it called? I think its a fairly obvious idea that the more adventuresome will go for.

Weakest point: the completely obscuring black shadow between the head and body. Its like the early days of celebrity porn when they literally cut & pasted a starlet's head on some other body. Heck, I could do that.

There are two main problems - colour/texture & sloppiness.

1) the colour/saturation and texture of the bat file that you copy and pasted into the painting file are not the same. You did a pretty job with the colour under the circumstances. There's a lot of green remaining in batman, and that doesn't match up with what looks to be reds in the painting file. The simple solution is to turn the whole file into b&w and then change the hue completely, to a batman-like blue, for example. The texture is all wrong. This is a tricky thing here because the batman file is a lot cleaner than the base image you're using. Therefore, you can't clean up the base image as easily as you can degrade the batman file. So consider trying to get some semblance of sameness in the areas you've copied/pasted from batman, using pieces of garment from the base picture, or other texture files you can find on the net. To do it, you'd lay those texture pieces on top of batman and play with opacity and blend modes until it matches up. Or you can do it by hand by painting in scratches, etc., and experimenting with blend modes for those scratch layers.

2) the other thing is that there are pieces from both files that should've been removed, but were not. When you put two files together like this you always want to make sure you haven't left scraps of those files lying around on layers, because observers will notice it under strong light, as this is what people will look at first. If you boost brightness in this image, as I've done here, you'll notice errant pieces that were left behind and are marked off by circles in the attachment. The top circle is from the wide white collar of the guy in the original pic. This needs to be cloned or painted over. The other circles are pieces left over from batman that need to be removed before you post this to your contest. If they still exist in a psd file on their own layer you could just erase them. If you collapsed the file then you'd have to clone over them.

Not too bad tho. Good job. Keep it up.

Mig

Dispite our criticisms, he seems to have done well ;)
http://www.worth1000.com/cache/gallery/contestcache.asp?contest_id=10424&display=photoshop

Almost the same mod was done before, big . . . :

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i319/RokcetScientist/FrHcreep.jpg
and entered in a contest.
Coincidence?

Found at http://www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?contest_id=7794&display=photoshop (link)

Well its a similar contest, so its not suprising. In the superhero one did you see how many entries picked the same image?