Fotolia Ten - 2. staffel - Soongyu gwon - South korea - Tutorial

Hello, I am Gwon Soon Gyu (Soongyu Gwon). I'm going to show you my ten collection work. I cannot live without my Mac, iphone, and Photoshop. I am also fond of Firefox and Diablo 3. I chose Kentauros from the Greek mythology We always think of a very strong male for Kentauros. I wanted to see him in a different way, as a fragile and vulnerable girl. I have no defined work process or direction. I rather try to find the things I need one by one. I already had a specific idea about a girl for Kentauros; young and very feminine and I found the perfect image of this girl on the Fotolia website. Then I found an image of a foal and added his legs on the lower part of her body. I chose foal over a horse to make it look even weaker. Then I added several crows. They are elements to add fear and tension. Meanwhile, I placed a dead tree with lots of branches around her for protection from them. A desert image was chosen for a background to add a stark atmosphere and I placed 3 moons in the sky to make it fantasy-like. It looked too much 2D, so I added some small particles such as feathers and blizzard to make it look 3D. I adjusted the colour tone and then added some blue tone to make it feel cold. I don't think I have any specific tricks of my own. My favorite tools from Photoshop are the Brush, Eraser, Path tools and I use Blur quite often. I invest lots of time in finding good images and then try to edit them the way I want and this may take enormous time. No hidden secret; select the best images, chose the right image cuts and paste them in your best possible way. Most of my work is based on photos, though I incorporate drawings and 3D from time to time when I think that they are necessary. For the Ten Collection I edited high quality images that I found on Fotolia. I am a heavy photo user. However, I always love to try out various techniques from drawings and 3D to make my work much richer. To connect the bright upper half of the girl's body to the dark legs as natural as possible, I erased the boundary with a 250 pixel soft brush changing the transparency from 10% to 30%. I went through this process several times and got a better, satisfying result. To make it look real, a 1 pixel brush and the colour between these 2 parts was chosen. Additionally, various colours were mixed together and a colour gradation which goes darker from top to bottom was finally made. I also decreased the saturation for a calm looking scene and adjusted the hue to blue for the colour adjustment which affects the whole atmosphere of the image. The next tool applied was the brightness/contrast mask. The brightness of the bright area was dropped a bit and the contrast was increased by around 20. Using curves, I made the dark area even darker and the bright area even brighter by adding a point, which led to a dramatic colour tone.