The Prestige - Thoughts?

[Spiralofourdiv]

The Prestige by ~SpiralOfOurDiv on deviantART

Any thoughts would be nice.

Thanks.

-Brian

[littleny]

very cool. i love the way the ace of spades is captured. niiice work!

[windrider86]

If you check out the rules posted at the top of the page they ask that a more specific question is asked.
Would you be able to do that? If I said please? and thank you

[JGennuso]

This is awesome! How much PP went into this?

[Spiralofourdiv]

I do apologize windrider, I'm semi-new to the forum and honestly don't spend enough time on here (plus I'm just a rebel at heart!). I guess my main questions are:

1. Does the photo seem plausible/realistic, or does it LOOK over post processed?
2. IS the negative space on the right a good thing. People have responded both negatively and positively to it. I tried cropping it differently, and it made the Ace of Spades alone the subject of the photo, when really I want the entire flourish to be the subject; the Ace is kinda just a little bonus... a subject within a subject, if you will. What do you guys think?



To JGennuso,

A lot. Haha. I don't exactly keep track of how long it takes me for each photo I do, but.. I'd assume at least a couple hours. The shot is actually composed of about four separate shots. I'm not skilled enough with cards to actually perform this flourish myself, so I took a bunch of pictures of me ATTEMPTING to spring them all into my other hand (but mostly they just flew around the table). I also took a separate photo for each of my hands that you see, each holding about half the deck, so they wouldn't be blurred out by movement. Finally, I took a picture of me simply holding the ace of spades where it was roughly supposed to be. From there, I took both pictures of my hands, aligned them, and took the cleanest shots of my flinging the cards around to produce a nice, acceptable clean motion of cards from hand the hand (using a lot of clone/stamping and adjustment layers + masks). Then I finally cut out the ace and placed it in the photo, reducing its opacity a bit, adding a twinge of motion blur to a duplicate of it. I merged all the layers EXCEPT the Ace layers and did B&W conversion on them using a channel mixer Adjustment layer. Then I merged the Ace layers, did a bit of hue/saturation work to make them glow the way they do, then flattened the entire thing.

...So.. yeah, it was quite a bit of work, I don't know if you wanted the entire process (as it might force this thread into the "how I did it" section) but at least it answers your question thoroughly, right? Haha.

Anyway, thanks a lot guys, sorry I was bending the rules a bit. But other than the questions i listed above, any other critique is very welcome.

-Brian

[ocnsprt]

WOW... all I can say. Excellent editing, great capture (or captures I gues is more appropriate) It does not look to pp, in fact if you hadnt listed what your technique was I never wouldve known it didnt look like that ooc. I am usually not to impressed with merged pictures, but this is mindblowing to me. I use picture merging sometimes on portraits to get eye pop or to correct blurs, but this is just awsome. Thanks so much for sharing