This time around, I came to the task to finishing my photo bashed composition by adding all missing elements to the scene. It was slightly hard in the sense of having to find more or less appropriate photo textures to fit the proportions and perspective. Looking at the final piece, I think it has some cohesiveness, meaning that the viewer is able to differentiate between the different levels of depth. This attempt makes the composition a “photo real” version, using only bits of photos to fill the entire canvas.
For the main architectural shapes, I was looking for larger forms to fill the scene, and then finding individual elements that would create this sense of cohesiveness. An example of this is the larger entrance towards the focal point, with the same set of relief sculptures decorating the side panels. This creates a certain expected balance in architecture. Having selected the main entrance, side decorative panels and the crest-like arch on top, I looked for simple beams that would cross horizontally. Since all the different elements had different color sets to them, it was important to standardize them into a defined set so they could merge and integrate to each other.
This is logically crucial because the more color harmony is achieved, it is easier to sell the idea that this space could actually exist in reality, or belongs to a believable story. I also desaturated the blue sky a little bit to decrease the tendency of the eye to be drawn towards the most saturated spaces in the scene. Another important element to keep in mind is the idea of grouping color values as much as possible so the eye is less confused about the order of the visual elements contained in the scene.
I was working for some time in darkening the foreground tree to the left to create that hierarchical sense of this tree being closer to the camera. I then went in to change the levels in Photoshop, selecting certain parts of the scene with the lasso tool and darkening those areas. I think that sometimes I was more effective in reaching the desired result, and sometimes not so much. Something that was surely enough easy to notice over time is that once that selection was darkened to create shadows, when edited back to try to get the original state, the applied effect would look different. I guess this means that I have to commit more to my editions, instead of necessarily keeping copies of everything all the time.
For this next phase I am probably going to continue with this process of integrating the different elements into the scene, adding soft and hard shadows as well to create more directional lighting. I am pretty sure that the following steps of transitioning my portfolio into a more “photo real” one is going to be a mix of learning 3d techniques and then incorporating photo bashing techniques to finish a scene in photoshop. It seems like it is a process in which I will need to place an emphasis in learning both workflows at the same time.
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