Rogue

While on one of the many bizzare tangeants my mind often wanders off into to, I ended up doing a tiny shop touchup to an image.

Follow up:

What it started as was that I was reading the forums right here at ML.com when I thought "I need to thread bomb that post. Where are my bombs at?" and naturally I had nothing worth posting. A quick picpop search and a bit of googleage later I'd managed to scrounge up a few which weren't too bad.

The one I decided to go with was of a retro Vargas-esque girl with a chalkboard. The problem was that it was a second hand download and the previous author had absolutely butchered the image something terrible, a real mess.

Straight up the original scan was probably very low res, or it was saved with a restricted colour pallete. So the whole picture has a bad case of rampant noise across the whole canvas. With my limited skills there wasn't a whole lot I could do other than try to smooth it out using the 'shops filters. Dropping the detail retention down to bugger all and ramping up the strength yielded good results across her body but did little to change the blackboard in the background.

Next up was the writing hacked in over the foreground chalkboard. For starters it wasn't in perspective and secondly I don't say 'jackass'. It's too yank. A quick sample of the back color then airbrushing on a new layer wiped it away.

Then things started to go south as apathy and tiredness started to set in. What I should have done was rasterize a handwriting typeface then altered the perspective. What I did instead was to just pick the first non print font and skew it. Close enough eh?

Then we come to the ruined floor area. Again it fell victim to my lack of reference, skill, and time. So a quick gradient lashed across it using the ML forum background color (#6A6A6A) effectively blurred it enough to be out of eyeshot, instead of fixing it.

The changes are minor and subtle. But every tiny little tweak like that can build something grimey and hopeless into something pleasing to the eye.