All done now.

Here’s the original, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” By Satoshi Matsuyama.

And here’s mine, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” by me.

And, because the original artist is so enthusiastic about presenting the image in full res glory, rather than only presenting resized versions for the web, here it is.

It’s very tough to get absolutely everything perfect for that kind of size, especially as I’m used to creating images that are more likely to squeeze neatly onto a monitor, and clearly not everything is absolutely perfect, due to time constraints, but I could at least see how much devotion the artist needs to have in order to attain the quality of work that he creates. I’ve tried to follow it very closely, using techniques that the artist employs, including the use of both high res photos, and drawn objects such as the tree and birds. I would have used photos of birds but every time I set my camera up towards my window, they all decided to hide away. So screw them, I can make my own. They don’t want to be in my picture, that’s fine by me.

It was very important to get the vibrancy in colour just right, though admittedly, this is easier to do when working from a “template”, as the original image was to me, than building up the colours from scratch. Starting with the background is a good idea, as it determines the precise colours and shades that the foreground objects need to have, and the red sky and almost white sun are key to the colour in this whole image. Overall, I’m very pleased with it.

I’m losing count, but about 10-12 hours in now I’d say, and a whopping 169 megs. Not quite the 30 gigs of the original, but it’s by far the biggest .psd I’ve ever worked with, and the G5’s can still handle it pretty well too. It would probably kill my laptop if I gave this to it.

So, nearly done and now it’s all coming together quite nicely and looking pretty darn sexy. The spiny plants on the right were taking absolutely ages to cut out, and I was only halfway through, so I cheated a bit and just duplicated the half, flipped one of them horizontally and made whole ones out of that. Whether or not Matsuyama-San does that on a regular basis, I don’t know, but I bet he does. The layer for the tree in the background has had the “multiply” feature applied to it, to seperate the background from the tree, and the contrast has been kicked up to help it along, which is a big help if you’re working with things like silhouettes. Still need to make some adjustments to that, then I’ve got to add some large leaves in the foreground, in the top right hand corner, plus the birds and make some general tightening up, and hopefully I’ll then be all done.

Don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I’ve mostly been using layer masks to cut out all the objects, so that if I need to bring anything back, after going a bit overboard with all the cutting, it’s easy enough to do so.

An update on the ‘ol artefact. Going well. I’m about 7-8 hours in now, and I’d say maybe about halfway through. Ish. I have a week to get it finished, so should be ok. Previously, I had drawn out my tree using the polygonal lasso tool, as I wanted it to look enough like the tree in the original, and I didn’t want to spend ages hunting around for a tree in a very specific shape so I could take a photo of it. Yesterday I started tackling the leaves, and they’re rather a pain in the arse, as you have to do a lot of cutting out and masking to make sure some of the background gets through, convincingly. Looks ok at this resolution but close up, they’ll need more work still. Today, I did a bit more of that, and textured the tree using closing up photos of tree bark, plus I added the grass and bushes. The clone stamp tool came in handy for the grass. Some of the colours are looking a bit too bland at the moment, which goes against the Satoshi Matsuyama way, but it’ll all come together when I add the other elements.

I’ve been working on the artefact today, and am making pretty good progress. About 4 or 5 hours in now and here’s where I’m at;

I’m quite pleased actually, I think it looks pretty cool. Things like the sun and its rays, and the background colours are made from simple Photoshop brushes and gradients etc, but everything else is made from a variety of photos, with heavy use of the Curves tool to alter the colours according to what I want.

It certainly looks very idealised, and while you wouldn’t mistake it for an actual photo, it does look rather detailed and very colourful, which is exactly what the original artist goes for. Satoshi Matsuyama says “Even the most impossible dream is made possible with Photoshop” as he takes you to a beautiful, serene desert island, staring at a fantastic maroon sunset filled with clouds of all varieties and extremely vibrant colours. It’s so supposed to be an image of paradise and a representation of dreams. Detail is very important, and he doesn’t want his works to just be shown on the web in sizes that will fit a monitor, they should be blown up big and in high res, to fill up a whole wall. I won’t be doing that, probably nor will I be working from 4am to 6pm everyday on it, like he does – that doesn’t seem healthy to me – but I will be ensuring that pretty much the whole piece looks very good when viewed at 100% resolution (4101 x 3200 pixels), and not just at 50% or 25%, etc. That’s tough, but it’s made easier just by the resolution of my photographs, as they don’t usually need to be resized much when they’re brought into the .psd files, so there’s no need to worry about adding certain details by hand. I just need to ensure that all the photos blend well with each other and are the right colours.

I’ve been having alot of fun with this and so far the G5’s in Babbage have been doing an excellent job of keeping up with working with this now 85MB big file. I’m expecting it to go into maybe 2 or 3 hundred by the end! I’ve been using my graphics tablet to help me cut out the images and erase the unwanted edges. Still feels a bit “fluffy” here and there, where it’s hard to seperate quite vague clouds from their background, but there will be alot of tightening up and finishing touches at the end.

I’ve been ignoring the artefact project so far so I thought I’d make something of a start today. I have however, been building up my library of useful photos so they’re ready to be brought right into photoshop and placed together. The image I’m reconstructing is..

“Softly as in a morning sunrise” By Satoshi Matsuyama.

And as the creator did, I’ll be assembling an image as close to that as I possibly can, using my own photographs and Photoshop skills. I have been taking photos of various bushes, gulls and the ocean, to go along with photos I already had of the sky and trees, from previous projects and things. One of the things that’s key for this artist is for the work to be in very high resolution, crafted with meticulous detail and intended to be blown up on print rather than only being seen through a monitor, in a size that will fit comfortably on it. His .psd files regularly lie between 30 and 60 gigabytes, which is ludicrously big, but fortunately Mike isn’t going to make me stick to that, and the printout need only be A3, so that’s what I’m going for. Here’s what I have so far…

A Photoshop screenshot. Not much is it really? But at least it’s a start! Just a few coloured shapes and some markings using my tablet to help me sort out where everything’s going. It’s 400% bigger than the original, based on the exact same dimensions, and I reckon that’ll be detailed enough. It may not come to 30 gigs but I’m willing to bet that the .psd will be pretty damn chunky in file size anyway, so I’m going to keep it on my 1gb usb pendrive (which should be able to hold it, I hope) and work on it on the G5’s in Babbage from now on, as I don’t think my laptop, well behaved as it is, will be able to handle it.