Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Glam in CG -- and in monochrome







As promised ... glamour! Here's a photo shoot featuring the same model you saw as Dartagnon a while ago, and as the robot's buddy yesterday -- and the M4 Sweats costume I was talking about yesterday, which has the morphs to do amazing things. Most costumes don't have an "undress" function, but this one does, and you can get, um, creative!

The skinmap, incidentally, is Raphael. That's the Rock Star hair by Neftis, which has been "pulled" a bit with the adjustments; and he has the Eyes Have It green eyes, though they don't show in renders at this distance from the virtual camera.

Speaking of getting creative -- I was interested to see how these would look in the classic black and white medium. So here, below, is the last of the set, dropped into monochrome and then with the contrast hiked (things usually used to get more contrasty in the printing, unless you used sloooow photo paper. There: you never knew Kodak and Ilford photo came in different speeds, did you?! Numbers 1 and 2 were slow papers; 3 was normal, 4 and 5 were "fast" papers for soft negatives ... and you could even get up to number 10 paper, from special manufacturers, which cost a fortune and gave "aetistic" results)...


And to continue experimenting, I added grain to the image, to give it the look of a real photographic print made from a negative -- you'll have to click on this one to see it full size, to see the grain effect, though, because the size compression hides it:


A long time ago, I used to love working in b/w. Spent so much time in the darkroom, I almost turned into a vampire. Color developing came along in the 1980s, and I did a fair bit of that too, but the issues of contaminated chemistry knocking the color registration off made color printing into hard, slogging work. You didn't have those problems in monochrome, so you were able to enjoy it a lot more, at the same time as wasting a lot less paper and fluids! Part of me is nostalgic for the darkroom. Part of me is sooooo glad to be able to hit "print" and send an image created in the computer or in the digital camera right to the printer.

Jade, 3 May