Any good resources for this type of work?

wow...that's some incredible work!!

Have you clicked on "Case Sudies?"

You can see dfferent work and how they got there. (steps)

I'm not aware of any links regarding that type of work,,,

I guess you can get a very good idea by studying the "Case Studies".

I'd suggest try something like that...shoot some images with a concept in mind and experiment assembling then.

The only limit is your imagination and the technical knowledge of Pshop.

I'm sure the more you know about photoshop the better off you are.

I really like this styff man!

Part of the "next level" is the source images. Poo in, poo out—as they say. :) Once you have those images set up for each separate element you want in the composite image, you're almost home free. You just need to combine the images using layers and then work with the lighting.

Masks would work well on a car for example because you could take a day shot and a night shot (from the exact same spot, just different lighting) and blend them together to create a more stunning image. Lots of the clouds and lighting they use you just can't reproduce when you want them so you just pick what you want and put them together.

That's how I'd do it. :D

Yeah, I definitely looked at their case studies, and it definitely gives me a good idea of the general process. Fortunately I'm a photographer so I have plenty of images to work with. In the past I've played around with blending two images shot at different times with good results. I understand the overall concept very well, but as they say, the difference is in the details.

I think what impresses me with their work the most is the lighting effects they achieve. They use enough images in any composite that the lighting will be slightly different among photos, and its astounding how they blend it all together. The images are not realistic in that sense, but with nothing to compare the images too, they come across as completely believable. They are also superb with perspective (such as the tunnel case study). I guess lighting and perspective would be the two main areas I'd be stoked to find some more advanced tutorials/concepts...

woops, my browser logged me out. that last post was from me...

I gotta say, while the images represent some very good PS work, they really aren't too terribly impressive. The photos were "composed" photos, meaning they were shot at specific angles with the intention of doing what they wanted to do. In looking at the case studies and the gallery, I saw nothing that wasn't easily accomplished, give enough time to do so. Now if you told me they did it in under 4 hours I would be very impressed.

I like "Poo in, poo out." I'm going to have to remember that.

The compositions are a result of planning, planning, planning. Sketch after sketch - meeting after meeting. They're not the result of just sitting down for a while with some random photos, masking some things out, and moving them around. You have to have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish, and an action plan of how you will do it.

It would be interesting to see the real progression of those images. The poorly masked tree, weird shadows/lighting, the disproportionate duck...

i've seen this site before but didn't click on the case studies. i wish the images were bigger. i can hardly see anything and in this case image is everything! :O

bteverybody wrote:

It would be interesting to see the real progression of those images. The poorly masked tree, weird shadows/lighting, the disproportionate duck...

This too is what interests me. The planning and setup is kind of a given, but final execution seems very well done to me. Planning the shoot and doing a rough composite of the elements would be relatively easy, but the small details is where I'm impressed. No matter how well planned these ads are, there are enough images taken for any one of them that there will be inconsistencies in lighting, perspective, etc. Correcting those problems is what I'd love to learn more about. I realize that at that level it really is just problem solving and there isn't any one solution that can be taught in a chapter of a photoshop book. Yet a discourse on attacking these types of problems would be fascinating.

I noticed that they use the Silicon Graphics based Barco Creator for their compositing work, and then do soft proofing and color adjustments in photoshop. Anybody know anything about Barco Creator? I quick search on the Barco website and it looks like that product has either been renamed or discontinued.

there is at least one post about such techniques on CB: link

we could do more if that's what interest you! :D

good article, thanks! More of those would definitely be good in my opinion.

so, which image/technique do you think would be interesting to explain? can you give me a topic?

Well, the topics that I always trip over the most are:

-lighting (light wrapping, shadows, matching luminosity, etc.)

-perspective (changing/matching perspective. One point, two point, three point and tips for doing it correctly)

Those are the two big ones that I think are sorely left out of most Photoshop tutorials (besides just basic "this is the lighting effects filter or use transform to change perspective). The topics are huge so its kind of hard to cover. Maybe we could start some kind of longer tutorial that takes an actual project from start to finish. The soccer ball tutorial is really helpful, but I'd love to see an entire project dedicated to photorealistic compositing so we could collaborate and learn various techniques that would be involved in a higher-end project. Just an idea. Email me if you'd like to talk it over more without hijacking this thread.