Back by popular demand ... the same model as yesterday, in a different setting. The pose is virtually the same,but the setting has changed. In fact, this post, today, is about backgrounds. We talked about the model yesterday.The background on this one is actually a digital composite. The background is a high-rez scan of a photograph of high moorland (could be one of Sara's pictures of the UK, or Mel's images of Alaska ... I can't tell with this one. There's places in Alaska that look identical to this when there's a layer of snow; there's places in the north of the UK that look just like this. Anyway -- thanks for the photo, guys ... if you can even recognize it, since I got done with it. The scan was done at 600dpi and then resized to 2x3 dimensions, and then cut up!
What I did to get the background was this: cut the picture at the skyline. Keep the hills, ditch the boring, boring overcast sky. Take the sky off another picture. Paste them together. Turn the gamma down to almost 0. Flatten the contrast ... makes it look light night, right? Turn up the blue to help the effect, Now, these are both daytime photos, so the next thing you want in the shot is stars. set the airbrush at 100% pressure, 4 pixels wide, and white ... start zapping in stars ... do some blue, some red, some gray. Make some 2 pixels for realism and variety.
Save the composite background and import it into DAZ behind the model. Leave the lights the same as yesterday -- makes it look like he's standing in firelight -- the fire is just off-camera, slightly to his left. Render the whole thing...
Get it back into the paint program and paint dark, dark blue around his feet to make it look like he's standing in shadows. In fact, the model is just hovering weightlessly over the background photo! You have to connect his feet to the ground to give the pic a sense of gravity and reality.
And save it!
