Critiques - - Your opinions please

Ken Rogers · #1 05-29-2005, 12:23 AM

I've been teaching myself PS for 3 years now. I would really like this image to work. I have attached the two originals and the final composite.

I am pleased with the ripple effect in the foreground (showing a rippled reflection of my son, using Redfield's freeware ripple plug-in). However, I believe the water lacks detail, as it has an almost-pure reflection. I tried to brush in some surface mist in the distance.

I am not happy with the trailing ripples. If my son could actually walk across Okanagan Lake, what would the background ripples look like? Over time a ripple becomes wider, but should also appear smaller, as they trail into the distance. Any suggestions here? Any tips on how I could make more realistic ripples?

And how about a shadow? I tried to make a shadow appear on a water surface, but it looked all wrong.

Please feel free to modify.

Ken

Doug Nelson · #2 05-29-2005, 12:29 AM

If your son can walk on water, then you must be... (sorry, couldn't resist)

Duv · #3 05-29-2005, 12:30 AM

Hi Ken!

Love the area around Kelowna/Penticton. Hope you get a little more rain this season.
Your right. The little guy needs a shadow, possibly done with a displacement map. Unfortunately, beyond my limited capabilities.
Good Luck!

Dave

Gary Richardson · #4 05-29-2005, 03:07 AM

The first thing that hit me, was that the ripples were in the wrong place, considering the position of the boy's feet. As he is now on his right foot (left as we look at it), the preceding impact ripple would have been to the right, and the one before that to the left of that. Unless he hopped to where he is, and his body position does not suggest so.

But nice concept, I'll have a quick play with your image if you don't mind, back later.

Gary Richardson · #5 05-29-2005, 03:22 AM

Ok, had a very quick play with your image, repositioned on of the impact ripples, added some waves to water, and added shadow (doesn't work for me). Sorry don't have any free time today, will try to do a better job later if I get enough free time.

Caitlin · #6 05-29-2005, 04:06 AM

I think that change in water surface works well Gary - and the relocation of the ripples. I don't mind the shadow, but the reflection still doesn't seem right to me (I think it might be too clear?) - and a shadow probably needs to relate to that as well. I'm not sure how the location of a reflection relates to the shadow - but it must.

Very clever, both of you!

Ken Rogers · #7 05-29-2005, 05:44 PM

Gary,
I like the changes you made, nice job. What did you use to create the waves? Did you use a filter or was that your handy work?

Catlin,
I agree that the reflection isn't quite right, but I don't think it needs to be related to the shadow. The reflection should always be somewhere between the viewer and the subject, but the shadow should be opposite the light source.

After close study, I notice that my son's reflection rides right over the ripple, and shouldn't do that. (I'll go fill my sink again to study ripples more).

Thanks for the replies.

Ken

Gary Richardson · #8 05-30-2005, 01:10 AM

Hi Ken, I used Flaming Pear's Flood Filter to create the waves. First I duplicated the image twice, extracted the boy from the top copy, applied filter to bottom copy, applied mask, and masked impact ripple areas.

Flattened Image, then made a patch of 2nd ripple and area to left of it. Pasted to new layer, and moved to right, to re-position it. (Area to left covers original ripple pattern). Masked it to fit better into image.

New layer, cloned out a few areas of conflict, caused by moving ripple.

The original reason I added the waves, was that they would obscure any inadequacies in creating shadow, but I liked the effect. Personally I did'nt like the shadow I created, and would have left it out of the image, but your original post had asked for one, so I left it in.

As I said earlier, this was a rush job, took me about 15 mins, if I get the time, I'll try to do a better job. But it's a holiday day here today, so most of my time today will be spent in the village, helping to erect a 90 foot solid wood Maypole, which sits in the middle of the high street.

We have a local tradition, that says it can only be raised by the men of the village, using only manual methods, (no cranes or hoists allowed).

As you might imagine, its quite strenuous. The whole village is shut to traffic, and free beer is distributed to all involved with the enterprise,and general feasting and merriment follows. So I don't expect to be in any condition to do any Photoshop work for a couple of days.

Ken Rogers · #9 05-30-2005, 01:59 AM

Sounds like a lot of fun! Hope to chat with you again soon.

Ken

Kraellin · #10 05-30-2005, 02:53 AM

Ken,

the redfield plugin is an excellent plugin. i have it for psp 7.xx. i just played with your pics a bit (getting late here), and you can do what you want within the plugin itself pretty much. the first thing to know about that plugin is that he uses a double effect effect. to get what you want, you have to turn one side off and just use a single effect. to do that, notice the tiny eye over each effect form box, the yellow circle, or square or triange or hexagon in the black boxes. click on one of the eyes until you see a faint red X thru it.

after that, create just one ripple to your liking and position it using the sliders around the image box, where your new ripple is. that will position your ripple where you want it. use the other sliders like decay, intensity, and so on, to get the exact ripple type you want.

you may want to do this in a new layer and add in each extra ripple in another separate layer... up to you.

if you start with just the ripples in the water, you can then add the boy and do another effect. you can also remove the boy WITH his shadow intact and then using the ripple effects, even ripple his shadow or refract it.

it's hard to explain all this in text, so i'm only giving a rough outline here. play with the plugin. it shld be able to do what you want to do. some of the steps may be in the wrong order here, as i've only played with your images and the redfield plugin a bit here. it's an excellent plugin. you can do a lot with it and if you've got the whole bundle of redfield plugins (yes, even if it's just the free ones), you might try some of the others in that suite and see if you cant do a bit more to your composite. i forget all the one's he has, but being a holiday tomorrow, i can prolly look at this again then.

K.

Gary Richardson · #11 05-30-2005, 05:05 PM

Hi Ken,

Mis informed you in my last post. I said the Maypole would be raised manually without the use of machinery.

Today for the first time in over 400 years, the pole was lifted into place by a crane. This despite the assurances we'd been given my the maypole comittee, that that would not be the case.

It seems that they succombed to the bean counters and lawyers, who, worried by the current compensation culture prevalent in the UK, would not allow the traditional pole raising method in case someone got injured and sued the committee. (This has never happened in all recorded history of this event.)

I feel sad at the death of a long tradition, and the village tonight is in my opinion a much poorer place.

The festivities were as good as usual though, and I'm writing this with somewhat blurred vision.

Duv · #12 05-30-2005, 09:30 PM

I feel your pain Gary and that's coming from a dude living in a "new" country that really doesn't have rich traditions like England. By the way, do you think your committee supports Camilla becoming Queen?

Cheers
Dave

Kraellin · #13 05-31-2005, 12:04 AM

i played around with this a little more. the redfield plugin has a few limits that i dont like, but it can do fairly decent things. the biggest problem with it is, no matter how you resize the picture you're going to work with, the redfield has no zoom to rescale its effects. thus, even if you 10x the size of your original, the plugin is going to 10x the size of its effect because it loads the entire image into its preview pane and, the ripple sizing slider will only go so small. so, the problem isnt in making large ripple effects, it's in making small ones.

so, i had to trick it a bit and only work with sections of the original and resize those to a larger image and then apply the plugin. then resize the result and paste it back into the original in the right spot.

so, if your original image plugs in in the right relationship, then all fine and well, but if it doesnt, you're going to have to do some cut and paste and resizing and so on.

but, barring all that, i did get one result i liked ok. i had to use a different background image from the one you already had the ripples on, but the technique can be applied to yours. in this one, i took most of the bottom half of the original and resized it by 4x, i believe. i also loaded the whole image into the ripple plugin before that and set up my contrasts and other bottom half settings so they would be correct after i applied the ripples and pasted the image back into the original picture. all in all, it wasnt too bad. might not be exactly what you were after, but it gives you an idea.

remember, in the plugin you have two center ripple effects being created. it's easier to turn one off and work with it, then turn it off and the other back on. after you've got both relatively close to the way you want it, turn them both back on for a final look.

K.

Kraellin · #14 05-31-2005, 12:07 AM

oh, and since i'm also somewhat new to this plugin, i couldnt find a way to prioritize which ripple would be the senior one, meaning that if you wanted to show one as happening later than the other and the effect that would have. it just didnt seem to allow for this. so, whereas i think it's an excellent plugin, it does seem to have those two flaws to it, the relative scaling and prioritizing the ripples against each other.

K.

Ken Rogers · #15 05-31-2005, 12:28 AM

Thanks to everyone for the great ideas. Kraellin, I see what you mean about the Redfield Plugin's limitations. I did a similar approach as you. I made larger oval selections of the water, then put these selections onto individual layers. Then I applied the ripple effect to each of these layers, adding extra ripples to the older footsteps and shrinking the layers afterwards. I also reduced the transparency of the older footsteps so that they wouldn't stand out as much.

Gary, thank you for directing me to the Flaming Pear plugin. That's definitely worth owning. I even applied the effect seperately to the reflection, so that the reflection would match the reflecting surface. I decided to give up on the shadow after all. I don't think it's all that important anyway. I do wish there wasn't blazing sunshine on my son's face, because in the background it appears to be late in the day.

I'm still looking for suggestions from anyone. Everything is layered and masked, so it's easy to edit.

Ken