What's wrong with this photocompositing?

[silviapasquetto]

Hello to everyone!
I'm Silvia an Italian photographer. I'm trying to improve abut photocompositing so I'm practising with a pic that will be the first of a personal project. Basically, my question is: what's wrong with that? I know that I should work better on the edge between the flowers and the sky, but there's something wrong that I feel but I can't see. Can you tell me please? What about the two small people embracing in the windows? Is realistic? Maybe is there where I feel something wrong.
Anyway any critiques will be really apreciated.
Link to the picture here: www.silviapasquetto.com/download/homepage.jpg
Have a nice day! :-)
Ciao from Italy!
Silvia

[skoobey]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

This topic will be moved to critiques, just an FYI.

Sky around the couple should definitely be darker, like the rest of the picture.

[klev]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

Your scene implies many phantom light sources in the outer areas. The indoor lighting on the couple makes even less sense, and you have what look like soft boxes still visible as well as a spec of a light stand leg. The plant life feels gigantic, but I don't know whether this was intentional. It still has technical mistakes, such as the partly cloned portions. The outline of some of the plants against the sky is weird in some spots. I could go on, but there are so many obvious mistakes that I wonder why you put it up for critique at this point.

[silviapasquetto]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

Thanks for moving the post (sorry!) and thanks to everyone for your answers, they are precious. Klev, I'm sorry if this thread was too much a beginner one, but of course the reason why I put it, was because I'm a super beginner (aware of being) and I'm trying to get better. Obvious is obvious when you can see and when you know how to do the things well. ;-)
Thanks again to everyone for this hard critique this will help.. I will start again from zero. Klev you mentioned there are really big mistakes about cloning of flowers... I had many troubles about doing that and I tried the best I could. When there are patterns so complicated and rich of details.... how to clone it well? It took me many hours and the result was unsatisfactory... so how can I manage it in a proper way?
Thanks again.
Silvia

[skoobey]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

Make new layer on which you duplicate, then mask the flower nicely, then you put it in place. You don't just use cloning brush.

Practice practice practice

[klev]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

It took me many hours and the result was unsatisfactory... so how can I manage it in a proper way?
Thanks again.
Silvia

I have to think about these things in terms of how I would approach them both in methodology and stages. I've done this stuff before, and it's not that easy. Also in spite of my comments I liked some stuff about it. I liked the overall palette.

Start by masking out foilage. Depending on the level of detail, you may or may not be able to mask things along the borders of leaves. Anything from the background needs to be either removed or it will have to be blended later to look like part of the new background. Either works, because this isn't an exact science. For masking I would use either the paintbrush tool with your layer mask channel shown (should look like a color overlay of some sort) and the overlay color set to something that helps you see the edge. You have to be comfortable tracing the edges. Don't just try to fill in the interior, because you'll get terrible edges. The alternative would be the pen tool.

Next you will move the various pieces to the new image. Sometimes you will break them up further, because you want a different arrangement, but the big thing here is to get the scale and perspective right. This means you may end up shrinking them, and you may end up using the skew transform. Poor scaling is a common mistake though, and it really ruins the image. Some people may not know what is wrong, but they'll know something is off. You don't want that. You also really need to consider relative distance when determining scale. As you can see the foilage is all the same size, yet some of it is set further back in the scene.

You will also want to consider some of the exaggerations that would come from this kind of lighting, and I think that is best done by gathering reference. I imagine you still want that sort of surreal quality, but you'll see that with that sort of setting sun, you would be more likely to have very bright slats rather than such an even distribution of lighting. Trying to describe it further than that could be misleading without the use of examples, which is why I think you should consider reference material involving very late afternoon lighting. As I mentioned you won't use a completely realistic effect. I just you need to examine some of it. That left side bugs me more than anything. It doesn't have the deep flat shadows I would expect in certain areas, and the sky still has bright spots even though the sun is setting at an angle that wouldn't cause that type of atmospheric reflection there.

[silviapasquetto]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Klev your analysis is really deep and make me realised how much things I can't analyse and solve properly. I guess it's hard to get started to a proper method of working without seen someone expert, doing it. Anyway this is what I learnt:
1) Lack of reference images of lighting to understand better how it works generally speaking.
2) Underestimation of the escalation and perspective issue.
3) Necessity to become much more smart and precise about masking.
4) Photocompositing is create a new image. I made the mistake that I used the pic of the house and flowers with sun and I added things. No! Let's start again from zero and add the things extracted by the pic piece by piece carefully.
Do you think it would be possible to use this image issue for a retouchpro episode? (@doug nelson)
Thanks again.
Have a nice week end
Silvia

[skoobey]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

1.Start with a sketch. This way you'll know what the elements are.

[klev]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

As Skoobey suggested, start with a sketch or doodle. Jobs involving this will typically have art boards. Elements are sourced and altered to meet the desired criteria. If you had a house with flowers that worked well with your scene, that would be fine. If it already had a lot of work done, you wouldn't want to lay claim to that work, but from an artistic aspect, it doesn't matter if you use that as a basis. My comments involved several things that didn't work there. I assumed you had added those elements given the various ghosting from the clone tool, but I was pointing out things that didn't seem to work.

Some people do disagree with me on this, but this is where I think very basic drawing skills help. The ability to judge perspective and scale is a fairly fundamental topic, and it's really a prerequisite for what you want to do.

[silviapasquetto]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

What I have to add? Thanks again!!!!!! :-)
Silvia

[Enamul Hoq]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

different light shadow is creating the problem i think..

[Nezbitten]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

I think that there is a base grain / resolution miss match. The whole image is of a certain softness and grain. Match the figures with this it will help.

Also cut and past a brick from the chimney and place above their heads. Scale is an issue here also. The couple are way too small.

Just my 2 cents worth.

[silviapasquetto]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

Thank you very much! :-)
Silvia

[johntomswift]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

seems to me that the eye wants to zero in on the window and couple... and it just doesnt quite work... I would begin by looking at differences in sharpness...with the exception of the window you have the beginnings of a high key shot.. pretty sweet.. the window and the couple in it are tack sharp.. soften them up a tad to match the sharpness and contrast in the same focal plane of the flowers etc.. the sky/background of the couple needs to either go darker or simulate the sky that would be seen if there was no back wall of the room...

[silviapasquetto]

Re: What's wrong with this photocompositing?

Thank you very much!
Silvia