ban_sidhe vs HoboSong: Crayon Clash 2010! - Contest complete

[HoboSong]

ban_sidhe Wrote:I'm not sure whether voting has technically ended yet or not, but I've gotta ask:
HoboSong: Are you willing to share the technique you used on her hair? The results are fabulous, whatever you did. Mine looks kind of blurry and scribbly.

Im more than willing to share, but I dont know if I could sum it up as a "technique". And, Im always willing to share the PSD files, but since I usually use several, I dont know how helpful that would be.

Overall , I:
Create the masks
Do some basic coloring on the layers (using mostly gradient maps)...and lbend mode either multiply/screen/or overlay
Merge layers
Set blend mode to Color
Tweak/Blend/Manipulate with smudge
Merge visible layers, use the output as the "base" for the next round
Repeat


The differences in this job (pertaining to the hair):
1) I spent some time with the pen tool and "stroked" some of the finer hairs, and added/removed from masks.
2) Used highlight tones by brushing them in on an "overlay" layer where I wanted the sun to highlight and add contrast to her hair.


At the end of the day, I probably used 20 layers for the hair...not including the photo filters I used on the overall pic.
The reason it takes so many is that I try to add color to the full spectrum, and many are very subtle....like I'll add a
dark blue shadow layer.....use "multiply", but set the opacity to like 5%.... just to get some blue in the shadows. You can
barely notice a difference, but after you do many layers with all the ambient colors, the overall picture starts to
accumulate fullness and depth. The same colors from the ocean,sand, dress, and seaweed are in her hair...but they are
added as either multiply, overlay, or screen....and a (very) reduced opacity.


I think an interesting exercise would be to take a small square from a jpeg and save it. Then desaturate it and
colorize it yourself. When you're done, display them side by side at 1000X. You'd probably see that there are
many more colors than you think in a photo....and even if the normal eye cant tell you what and where they are,
they need to be there in order to not look "flat"