Squee. That's all there is to it.
Feb. 27th, 2005 05:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladynorbertBehold my mad photo manipulation skills. ;) Seriously, if you're at all familiar with TPDoEQ, you'll probably get almost as big a kick out of this as I do.
Well, explanation first. I'm making a hard copy of the entire TPDoEQ series, for myself and for two friends who have read part of it but don't have the necessary net access or time in front of a computer to read the rest online. Because this is me we're talking about, I had to go crazy and work on making everything perfect. Tonight -- five hours ago -- I decided to work on the cover art. In stages.
If you're a League fan, you've undoubtedly seen this photo, which is what I decided I wanted for the cover art. Of course, there are a few major problems with this picture where the TPDoEQ League is concerned; Dorian and Allan are both dead and Elizabeth, well, doesn't exist.
So I decided the easiest thing to do to start would be to rid the group of the immoral immortal. (Yes, I'll explain what I did, because I know at least one of you wants to know.) I basically cut Jekyll in half, then slid the cut section over so it covered Dorian and almost met Nemo's shoulder. I copied and pasted little pieces from elsewhere on Jekyll's pants to cover the cane-sword. Then I cut off Nemo's arm, copied the left half of Jekyll's torso, flipped the copy, and put it in place. A few smudges were added to hide the seams, and I gave Nemo back the use of his arm before I saved it.
Removing Dorian took me roughly an hour. Then my graphics program (Ulead PhotoImpact, for those who wondered; I don't know what it is exactly, it came with our scanner) crashed, so I had to reopen everything. Good thing I had saved already, or I might have cried. But the hour spent cutting out Dorian was nothing compared to what came next -- removing the beloved but very dead Allan from the picture.
Actually, removing Allan was easy enough. I just traced around him and cut him out. The hard part was the fact that there was now a gaping white hole in the image, and Allan's diminutive daughter was certainly not going to cover as much space as he had. So I painstakingly copied and pasted small sections of the window, wall and floor to cover most of the space left by Allan's departure, except for that bit you can see where I didn't bother because I knew it would be covered. I also decided I didn't like the way Jekyll's torso looked, so I altered it.
Of course, the last part was the hardest of all, because how do you put someone in a picture when that someone doesn't exist? I decided to go with Kate Beckinsale for my Elizabeth model, because that's who was "cast" to represent her at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clez's RPG. But I knew I wouldn't find a picture of her dressed like I saw Bess in my mind, so first I went on a body hunt.
I found, ages ago, a website about "dressing the Victorian lady," belonging to a photographer and his Victorian-obsessed friends, so I headed over there to study the possibilities. I immediately liked the purple dress from 1898 (how much closer could you get, really, to being accurate for the series?), and lo and behold, there was even a shot of the model holding a book. Elizabeth's diary would be in the picture with her! Yay! Only problem was that the book picture wasn't floor length, so I ended up copying both that and the main full-length shot, and putting the book-holding body onto the full skirt. It was kind of painstaking (though nothing compared to rebuilding that window!), but the results looked pretty good.
As for Kate Beckinsale's head, I decided none of the pictures I had on hand would work. After several minutes of Googling and getting annoyed, I remembered that she once held the title role in a television production of Jane Austen's Emma, so I looked for pictures just from that. I found a picture I liked, cut off her head, shrank it, "fuzzed" it slightly to make it more or less as blurry as the rest of the group, and merged it onto the dress. I fixed a few more seamy areas, made sure everyone's head was approximately the same size, cropped it a bit, adjusted the focus and brightness, and what do you know...it actually worked.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy. Tired, but happy. It even printed rather nicely.
P.S. Yes, Raven, you may use the final image for "Chronicles" if you want! Or, if you'd prefer, use this one....I couldn't stop poking at it, so I ended up with this oil paint version of the final image. I kind of like it, but use the one you would rather.
Well, explanation first. I'm making a hard copy of the entire TPDoEQ series, for myself and for two friends who have read part of it but don't have the necessary net access or time in front of a computer to read the rest online. Because this is me we're talking about, I had to go crazy and work on making everything perfect. Tonight -- five hours ago -- I decided to work on the cover art. In stages.
If you're a League fan, you've undoubtedly seen this photo, which is what I decided I wanted for the cover art. Of course, there are a few major problems with this picture where the TPDoEQ League is concerned; Dorian and Allan are both dead and Elizabeth, well, doesn't exist.
So I decided the easiest thing to do to start would be to rid the group of the immoral immortal. (Yes, I'll explain what I did, because I know at least one of you wants to know.) I basically cut Jekyll in half, then slid the cut section over so it covered Dorian and almost met Nemo's shoulder. I copied and pasted little pieces from elsewhere on Jekyll's pants to cover the cane-sword. Then I cut off Nemo's arm, copied the left half of Jekyll's torso, flipped the copy, and put it in place. A few smudges were added to hide the seams, and I gave Nemo back the use of his arm before I saved it.
Removing Dorian took me roughly an hour. Then my graphics program (Ulead PhotoImpact, for those who wondered; I don't know what it is exactly, it came with our scanner) crashed, so I had to reopen everything. Good thing I had saved already, or I might have cried. But the hour spent cutting out Dorian was nothing compared to what came next -- removing the beloved but very dead Allan from the picture.
Actually, removing Allan was easy enough. I just traced around him and cut him out. The hard part was the fact that there was now a gaping white hole in the image, and Allan's diminutive daughter was certainly not going to cover as much space as he had. So I painstakingly copied and pasted small sections of the window, wall and floor to cover most of the space left by Allan's departure, except for that bit you can see where I didn't bother because I knew it would be covered. I also decided I didn't like the way Jekyll's torso looked, so I altered it.
Of course, the last part was the hardest of all, because how do you put someone in a picture when that someone doesn't exist? I decided to go with Kate Beckinsale for my Elizabeth model, because that's who was "cast" to represent her at
clez's RPG. But I knew I wouldn't find a picture of her dressed like I saw Bess in my mind, so first I went on a body hunt.I found, ages ago, a website about "dressing the Victorian lady," belonging to a photographer and his Victorian-obsessed friends, so I headed over there to study the possibilities. I immediately liked the purple dress from 1898 (how much closer could you get, really, to being accurate for the series?), and lo and behold, there was even a shot of the model holding a book. Elizabeth's diary would be in the picture with her! Yay! Only problem was that the book picture wasn't floor length, so I ended up copying both that and the main full-length shot, and putting the book-holding body onto the full skirt. It was kind of painstaking (though nothing compared to rebuilding that window!), but the results looked pretty good.
As for Kate Beckinsale's head, I decided none of the pictures I had on hand would work. After several minutes of Googling and getting annoyed, I remembered that she once held the title role in a television production of Jane Austen's Emma, so I looked for pictures just from that. I found a picture I liked, cut off her head, shrank it, "fuzzed" it slightly to make it more or less as blurry as the rest of the group, and merged it onto the dress. I fixed a few more seamy areas, made sure everyone's head was approximately the same size, cropped it a bit, adjusted the focus and brightness, and what do you know...it actually worked.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy. Tired, but happy. It even printed rather nicely.
P.S. Yes, Raven, you may use the final image for "Chronicles" if you want! Or, if you'd prefer, use this one....I couldn't stop poking at it, so I ended up with this oil paint version of the final image. I kind of like it, but use the one you would rather.
