My contribution to the vomit of similar thread cropping up after Jon introduced his tutorial again. I spent about an hour making these yesterday, loosely based on Jon's tutorial, but with a lot of experimentation. So there should be a lot wrong with it; I'm interested in others' criticisms, since this is something that seems like it would be interesting to get better at. So;







The first one is the original. The second one is the original with a Gaussian Blur of itself softlighted on top of it. The third is an avatar I made much more along the lines of Jon's guide. I think the the avatar, naturally, looks nicest since it worked most closely along the lines of the guide, but I like a lot of the aspects of the first attempt better. Any ideas that anyone could throw out there as to improving it would be much appreciated. I'm not sure if there's any visible difference in the second, other than the fact that the text is slightly mutilated, but thoughts as to how it looks would be treated similarly. Thanks in advance for any and all comments.

 

T_T Damn it. Why is it that everyone is better at Photoshop than me? WHY SATAN WHY? Have I not sacrificed enough virgins for you?

 

What ever do you mean Knox?

Random note, why is everyone trying out Photoshop lately?

@Medias Did you darken the second sig?

 

Photoshop skills are good and all, but they are pretty useless without the principles and elements of art. If things like sense of balance and unity don't come to you naturally, take a simple Art course in highschool.

Lhefriel_Medies, something about your sigs rubs me the wrong way. Probably the font/font colour you used.

P.S. Something else too but I can't put my finger on what's exactly wrong with it.

 

Jon, yeah you are right. Both foreground and background have vivid/intense colours and high contrast.

...

Man, I gotta catch up on my sleep, that should have been easy to spot.

P.S. Xiph0:
a) All the action in Jon's sig revolves around the guy which makes him a clear focal point.
b) Him being right in the middle of the sig doesn't hurt too.

 

The stripes on his upper body are nearly invisible... at least they are to a blind bat like me.

The brighter the colour, the harder it is to see the stripes. As far as I understand it, Jon didn't want to make the entire man a focal point. It all leads to his eyes, so it's only natural that the area around them, and the devices that move our attention towards the eyes (explosion/wind/whatever) is nearly stripeless.

 

Ok, lets not turn it into a Taure-scale debate. You think that there should be no stripes on the dude's face. I think it's just fine the way it is right now. Lets just leave it at that, shall we?

Oh, and I haven't noticed that girl before... Right. Sleep. NAO.

 

I was trying to draw the focus to the flame sword (??), although I guess I shouldn't have made it slash all across the side. It's a point duly noted; I'll try to tone it down to something much more manageable in the future. The motion blur is definitely a good idea; I'm just going to need to figure out how to use it then, I guess.

The light was retarded. I couldn't see it at first, so I used it to make an outline; I kind of thought it clashed nicely with the background at the time, but in retrospect I wholeheartedly agree it looks ridiculous.

I'll keep these notes in mind and try to make a new one. I still kind of like this one for reasons that apparently aren't shared, but with the weekend and all, there's nowhere to go but forward. Thanks for everyone's time; I'll put the new one up whenever I get to it.

EDIT: Whatever, using it now. I feel lonely being different.

I duplicated the image, Gaussian Blurred it and softlighted it to make everything a bit more visible.

 

I tried again. I probably made too many branches, but I couldn't really decide what looked best on completion. I got a little fancier this time, and it seems like it's a bit crowded to me, but I wanted to see how everything fit together. Tried to create a clearer focus this time, made the text a bit clearer, gave the whole image a bit more identity. Still a lot of experiment involved, although I am getting slightly more comfortable with the program;









Critiques, again, appreciated. Also seem to be incapable of finding renders I actually want to work with. I'm not exactly looking particularly hard, though, so I can't really complain.

 

How would I do that?

I tried playing with it around a bit more and making the cape slightly more of an offshoot. It doesn't seem as if it draws the eyes to the actual focus as well as I'd hoped, like said. And tried playing with the background image a bit;







Eventually tried taking it out since it looked like it just started to detract from the image. Thoughts?