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Eureka - Cool Shadows



This is almost better than a RL "good hair day". I finally have cool shadows and sharp focus with a little depth of field thrown in for good measure. If you can be cool with blood red hair and a super bright goldenrod sweater,  I am guessing you can be cool in anything *wink*. (This updated photo has been airbrushed to erase white alpha lines. To solve this problem you can photograph against solid walls.) See the original photo at the bottom of this post.



This is a completely unretouched screenshot. No desaturation needed.

This is the same shot with only a small amount of diffuse glow added.

So it can be done using Imprudence (1.4). It can be done on an older computer (mine is pushing four years and wasn't that spiffy to start with). It simply CAN be done. It took me a very long time to get here even though I understood Windlight well. I refined the settings a bit at a time over many days, slowly moving toward the effect I wanted.

Now we know.

And to the viewer who wrote the other day about shadows across the face, I am not going over to the dark side. I just wanted to show the effect in the most dramatic way I could :D.



After a comment by a reader I replaced the original top photo with a more finished one. The only changes are some slight airbrushing at the edges of hair. The thin white lines do appear sometimes -- even on body parts such as hands.

There  is an alpha issue and will hopefully be fixed in the future. Using prim eyes might be a better idea also. I will give that a try soon. Still I am thrilled to have accomplished this :D. This is the originally published lead photo. Click for a larger view.

Comments

Eve said…
Shadows are cool but ... do you see the line between your hair and the background ?

It's very hard to find the good viewer to use shadows ...
Chic Aeon said…
Yes, I do see that line. It can be even worse some days. For a "real" photo I would air brush out that line but didn't want to process as it was the quality of light I was after. :D
Anonymous said…
oh chic I love your lightsettings .... maybe you feel like posting them again as you did about a year ago when you already played with the lights ?? I saved them all :-)

Shania Singh
Chic Aeon said…
Thanks Shania. I will think on it.

What I have found though is that even as we can share light settings, they in no way (at least for me and a couple of friend's machines tested) end up looking the same.

Different systems and different viewers (this setting doesn't look like this in the S20 view for example). It seems like there is no easy shortcut (believe me I tried) to get the light you are looking for. :D

Even the server platforms seem to change the look. Winterfell is on the WebViewer test and the mesa is on BlueSteel and there other others. Each "seems" (not enough time on this to say for sure) to give a very different look.

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