How to do this kind of water manipulation?

[santoro80]

How to do this kind of water manipulation? Is this just tranforming of water splashes or is it something more?
http://genia-l.com/wp-content/upload...Yik8fISSAG.jpg

[santoro80]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

It doesnt look like a mask.

[csuebele]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

That was done by Alex Koloskov who specializes in splash photography. It's multiple exposures of different splashes. His wife composites them. He has a lot of tutorials on G+

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexKoloskov/posts

[santoro80]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

I really cant imagine how it was done but $150 for his online workshop is too much for me

[csuebele]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

He also has blogs and video demos where he shows how he does things. $150 would be too steep for me also.

[santoro80]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

He should do a tutorial for Kelby Training

[kav]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

I really cant imagine how it was done but $150 for his online workshop is too much for me

It's understandable. You're 100% wrong in the way you examine his work though. Transforms not only affect the sharpness of pixels, but they can cause the lighting to no longer match. I suspect he sets up as much as possible in camera, possibly over hundreds of shots for a very complex job. It should be obvious that liquid wouldn't transform well when you look at its hard reflections. You can see his softbox almost perfectly in some of those reflections and in a more distorted sense in many more. He mentions the use of elinchrom on the site. That is probably because they've always catered to the niche of motion capture. You can learn quite a lot about what was likely one shot or another by looking at the patterns of the reflections and their relative brightness values.

First off basically ignore the background. If this was composed of many shots, he probably took a clean shot of the background as a canvas for the rest of the composition. That doesn't mean it wasn't lit simultaneously with the liquid, just that he may not have taken a background from a hero shot. Some basic understanding of Snell's law, reflections, and fresnel effects would help further with the visual dissection of such an image. It won't tell you what led him to certain choices in its creation, but I don't feel like debating that, as I'm not the photographer. Look at the image. Look for a highlight. Trace its falloff with your eyes, and try to understand the accompanying shape. I can spot a certain number for each wing. The antennae could be taken from larger shapes, but the tops of them were clearly spherical when shot. Otherwise the softbox reflections would have a much higher level of distortion. If you just spend some time piece by piece, you should understand what is being reflected and where it was located relative to the initial position of that piece.

I'm actually glad I came across this thread, as his work is really interesting. I hope I didn't nerd it out too much.

[spinq]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

The sharpness for the human eye is based on contrast mostly. If you are experienced in dodge and burn and have some painting skills you can actualy mold the drop of water to a desired shape and add contrast (paint in highlights and shadows to make it look believable.

As i said. You need to be a great retoucher for this kind of job. Will try to post a before and after photo once im done with my current work and to be clear - im not a great retoucher.

[kav]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

The sharpness for the human eye is based on contrast mostly. If you are experienced in dodge and burn and have some painting skills you can actualy mold the drop of water to a desired shape and add contrast (paint in highlights and shadows to make it look believable.

As i said. You need to be a great retoucher for this kind of job. Will try to post a before and after photo once im done with my current work and to be clear - im not a great retoucher.

Without getting into more nerd talk, I would never try burn and dodge tools with this. If needed I would paint the highlights wherever reflection data couldn't be scavenged. The data available in some of the midtone values just isn't worth anything when it comes to producing the appearance of direct/specular reflection. You would end up illustrating it, not dodging and burning it regardless of how good you are. Even if you used those tools, not much of the original data would be left by the end, as it's not just the values that change, but the range too within the gamut of your working space. The best splash work I've seen started with good source material. You can talk about great retouching, but you can still apply that following great photography.

[franko60]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

Depends how much I was getting paid for the job. If the budget was there, I'd get a perspex model made by Trengrove Studios or somebody similar (if there is anybody else).

[Repairman]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

Nice idea but I can't help feeling the image isn't quite as polished as it could be. The antennae have been flipped and there are subtle wave forms within the wings which betray the forming process. The 'body' looks rather plonked on to the wings and could have been refined to echo the dynamism of the wings. I like the image but the artist stopped before finishing IMO.

[santoro80]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

Alex Koloskov is talking about this image in this video (jump to 13:30):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZXQVUx0es8
The body was photoshoped, the wings are real splashes.

Here is the behind the scenes photo:
https://plus.google.com/+AlexKoloskov/posts/G65pmyeDCB2

[spinq]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

kav thank you very much for the comment, i never considered composing as a process where one would have to take much care of the original data. But of course i have to agree with the comment regarding the quality of the raw material. I do not specialize in spash photography so bth i dont have enough to be considered useful enough to manage without hours of retouching.

[kav]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

kav thank you very much for the comment, i never considered composing as a process where one would have to take much care of the original data. But of course i have to agree with the comment regarding the quality of the raw material. I do not specialize in spash photography so bth i dont have enough to be considered useful enough to manage without hours of retouching.

You know I have a decent dslr and some older dynalites, but I'm certain it would take an enormous amount of experimentation and pre-calculation to get workable splash concepts. If it was me, I would probably be tempted to start off with fluid sims just because I can do things like script them or pull frames out of the animation, tessellate, sculpt details, etc. I would have to come up with a good water shader too, and of course that invites problems dealing with vertex normals facing the correct direction and dealing with collisions and multiple refractions rather than a simple entry and exit surface with defined normals. It's not something you can really calculate as it occurs naturally afaik. I've read research papers on simulating oceans and things, and they often involve a lot of manual tuning.

I guess the point is any way you approach this, good results will take a lot of thought, planning, and revised practices as you learn more from experience.

[RobertAsh]

Re: How to do this kind of water manipulation?

Alex Koloskov is talking about this image in this video (jump to 13:30):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZXQVUx0es8
The body was photoshoped, the wings are real splashes.

Here is the behind the scenes photo:
https://plus.google.com/+AlexKoloskov/posts/G65pmyeDCB2

Actually, that's exactly what Alex himself says in this video Santoro posted.

I think Alex is fantastic. Very creative with a great imagination. Also, he makes an extraordinarily practical point -- rather than take days of shooting to get that exact splash, he'd rather get close and do the rest in Photoshop. He operates under tight time constraints and I seriously doubt more than a small fraction of people viewing his images would ever notice such tiny, overall insignificant details given the overall outstanding quality of what he does, and given his originality.

It's ok to notice details and even nit-pick. No one and nothing is perfect and this forum has people with some of the sharpest eyes anywhere, it's *very* educational reading these comments. But I think he deserves tremendous credit for imagination, creativity and overall excellence as well. The guy rocks.

For me, $150 for a workshop with him would be quite a bargain that I'd snap up in a heartbeat. It's just the coast-to-coast tickets to and from Atlanta, Georgia that are the killer...... Not to mention hotel, rental car and having to take off a couple/several days for travel time in addition to workshop time. All of that adds up.....