Good work on the hand lighting.

Great thread Tofu!

neat topic Chris. My suggestion... and I cannot believe no one noticed...get rid of that moon or flip the church around. the moon is in the wrong position for the light that is coming off of the church as is above. the light seems ot be coming from 2 o'clock not from 11 and its messing with my eyes
also brighten that moon up or put the clouds up there... I've never seen such a Grey moon before when theres no clouds in front of it.
I'm downloading the latest psd. I will fix what I see, and post when I get the chance

Good call.

I think that's what bc was trying to say...

Yeah I was worried about the lighting/shadows on the building but hoped I could get away with it. Like maybe there was another light source. Also I honestly couldn't determine where the light source would actually be on the church (but now that you point it out I can plainly see it ). I'll see what I can do about the moon & church.

Loving the feedback! And more importantly I'm starting to feel more comfortable in CS2 finally. Who knows... if I can buy some creativity then I may be a contender some year.

Just a note for other wannabes like me. Post your own 'practice chops' for the group to help with! You wouldn't believe how much you can learn on feedback like that I've gotten here. Even a little feedback can lead you down a path you wouldn't have thought of and you discover new stuff.

For instance earlier it was mentioned that a layer blend of color overlay could do what I was doing with a clipped color layer. While that is true I've discovered that I can selectively erase/mask-out parts of the clipped color layer. That can't be done with a layer blend and comes in handy sometimes. See I can learn!

ok heres what I came up with. I put some photofilters on this puppy esp on her horns... near us theres magenta for the orb glow and away its blue for the moon glow. Its not perfect, but boy does it help the depth and believable factor.. next I put a satin fill in the blending options already used on the church to darken the church. then used a 50% gray layer set to hard light over top of that and burned & dodged what I wanted highlighted and shaded more... brightened the moon, then I added stars,using a linear dodge layer yes even full moons have stars out, maybe not as much as I have, but hey its art, and I like stars. ( I use the same process as TBC used).

Oh sure, I remove the moon for you and then you show me how to keep it.

If I get a chance later I'll post where I'm currently at. I want to see if I can create a brush from the original source's curls/circles to create the dress. Stay tuned.

well after I started playing around... it needed the moon. so I tweaked the church instead

Focal point i may not have put it across in the best way with the blurryness thing but how about this for depth of feild...





What is your focal point... this blur is extreme but ya get the idea and ya certainly know where the focus is

I'd say her hands aren't enough of a focal point the way you did that Marx. It makes it visually uninteresting. The Sorceress is the focal point, not just her hands, and her hands aren't far enough from her face to make her that blurred out. Unless of course shes casting a spell of blurriness I think that was conveyed perfectly in mine and in the last few. although I made her more a focal point by darkening the church out (which was also blurred btw)

I understood what marx was doing. The examples were extreme end of blurring to clarify the concepts. Probably done very quickly too but it made the point for me (even though I understood the concept already)

yep chris I understood what he was doing too... and like I said. you wouldn't normally blur the woman when her hands are in focus. you are extremely nearsighted in that case, or she'd have to have very VERY long arms or shes cast the spell of blurriness

if you're really trying to obtain depth of field like that, and you want it to look 'good' leave her alone, blur the church then blur the moon at a greater %. Thats good depth of field.
example
http://photoshopcontest.com/view-entry/107287/lost-shaker-of-salt.html
I have 4 layers of depth there... one on the table/over hang in focus, the parrot, the beach, the ocean/sky

should I have used the Sarcasm font?