Anatomy of an Image

October 29th, 2009

I am posting a new piece over at The Grand Conspiracy today, and for those who are interested in those sorts of things, this is the image, and this is how I put it together.

Final Image

(click to see full-size)

This started with a render. Well, first it started with an idea about a girl who gives up her world of colors for the novelty of black and white. And then came the render. This took me about 2-3 hours to set up in Studio, and then probably another 2 hours or so to render out at 3600×3600. (Naturally I did this overnight, so I don’t know the exact render time)

This was the result of that.

I'm just a girl in the world...

I wanted something beautiful and magical in feeling, but I didn’t want the distraction of focusing on the girl’s looks rather than her actions, so I thought a full-back shot would be best. I lost the companion butterfly pretty quickly, as it just didn’t work in the final image, but otherwise this render needed very little post.

Next I chose a background, I wanted a large flat plain with a little bit of background interest, so I found this stock photo that reminded me a little bit of Dutch countryside.

I chopped it in half so I could use different effects with the grass and the background trees, and I added this sky for the cloud interest.

I added this tree for midground interest, with some gaussian blur to place it correctly in the distance.

After that I played quite a bit with the layers, merging everything together in a way that made sense to me visually. For the foreground, to give some weight and interest to the area where the girl was supposed to be living, I found this great stock tree -roots image, which actually appears on both sides of the image, just flipped and repositioned and otherwise fiddled with.

After that I added the flowers on the ground and around the roots from some photos I took in my Mom’s backyard, which I wanted to look like creeping phlox, even though they were actually pretty ordinary petunias. (if my Mom’s flowers can ever be considered ordinary.)

After that is was just fiddling, erasing, shadowing, playing with the black and white effect, more fiddling, walking away, coming back, fiddling again, etc. I had many more and different flowers added in at various points, but they all felt too distracting. All told I worked on this image for about four days on and off, and I was pretty happy with the result. (Work done in PSCS3, and the final image is 5200×3600 and about 630MB with all its layers.)

This was perhaps more colorful in the foreground in my mind’s eye, but when I attempted that in reality it lost its cohesion, so I left the colors more muted. Hopefully it still makes the point of the transition from color to non-color. I also struggled with having the girl lit from behind and having sunlight in the far distance, but in the end I decided that despite the incongruity, her world gives off its own light, and might compete with the light of the world she was walking into. It’s a fantasy image – dual light sources are at my discretion, right?

I have a companion piece to this in mind, now it’s just finding the time. Here are some alternative renders of the girl, just for the heck of it.