I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Monday, January 25, 2016

Sometimes I scare myself


Well, that strap is awfully annoying.


There. That's better.

2 comments:

Gristle McThornbody said...

It's only scary if you took a couple of hours editing the strap out. I've done worse on images I wanted to use, but needed to erase the background. It's really quite disturbing how much time I've spent deleting backgrounds around some very detailed foreground image. You know, working in the highest resolution possible so that every pixel shows. If that's what you did, you did a damn fine job!

If you just moved it to take the second picture, that just means you're sane.

Steve Buchheit said...

Hey Gristle, it was about an hour and a half retouching the (much) higher resolution image. Unfortunately it wasn't my photo, but it was the best photo available for the product for what we needed (heater in snow connected to shelter). I remove the backgrounds several times a day (I use layer masks, not erasing the background), if it was just that it wouldn't have taken too long. But getting the vent stack correct (and reconstructing areas of it, like the base of the "T"), reconstructing many of the tight places the strap crossed (edges, handles, etc) that were hard to make look correct, and redoing the shadows in the snow to make it look seamless… this wasn't the most complex retouching I've done, but it certainly took a lot of skills (including airbrushing new areas and structures that were obscured by the strap). While these are much lower res, you can still see some of that. The strap is thin, but where it crosses was really problematic.

For the day thing, I'm rarely able to take my own images (even being asked for my input to get mages rarely happens). Nobody at the day thing understands how these things should be done. I'm just happy that we're no longer getting just 640x480 photos. If they'd actually involve me our stuff would be 20x better (it's already 100x better than when I arrived).