kistaro

Wow, I didn't even notice the soldier's helmet until you pointed it out...

You're quite good. Very smooth n' seamless photo alterations.

What I do that differs from most AYB images is "uniform garbaging." I don't have perfect images to start from- they have JPEG imperfections, focus imperfections, and they're not going to be solid colors at any point- by the nature of reality, you're not going to have contiguous regions of one color. That's the greatest giveaway for "photoshop lines-" where the image is too perfect.

So I mess it up. After cropping out the text, I add artificial imperfections with dots of relevant colors and a blur tool, then use the gradient to match shading.

In the sign, I avoided five possible errors I could have made:
1. Failing to match the color of the border to the text.
2. Failing to match perspective and angle correctly. It's not perfect, but there's almost no way for it to be; it still looks pretty good, but still a bit "off" at the farther edge.
3. NOT running the text off the edge of the sign.
4. Failing to use blends to match the shadow, as well as the damage to the sign noticeable on the border. I cropped it out with the text, but imitated it with a very small black-transparent bidirectional gradient. It's too perfect on closer inspection, but it's still pretty good.
5. The Error of the Perfect Background- not putting in those little imperfections, that bit of dithering that everything real has.

The helmet text was added as an afterthought, but "Move ZIG for great justice" is just too appropriate for me not to do that.

Thanks, though- I'll keep at it. It's really more fun than it should be to do such images, especially when I can turn it into something of a political cartoon.

Apparently you do have an artist's eye. :)

The imprefections needed to make a photo-edit look convincing- I'm with ya there. Sometimes I've tried to clean all the imperfections out, and make it look /too/ perfect, just to see how it'll be.

One of the added-imperfections tricks I've done is to use the Film Grain filter, ever so lightly, over the finished image so it looks fairly uniform.

Suggested tool: http://www.nocturna.net has some Photoshop brushes designed for making things look gritty, imperfect, grungy easily- such as stains, text being visible from the other side of a paper, jotted incomprehensible notes, etc. I haven't tried it out myself yet, but Fareme has done some art using it and it looks neato.

Unfortunately, the brushes are a no go. I use The Gimp, not Photoshop, for the sole reason that the former is free and the other is $700.00. Although I'm going into college soon so I can probably get one of those l33t 90% student discounts or something. If there is one, which there may not be. I'll find out. The Gimp uses a different format for brushes and cannot read proprietary ABR files.

I don't actually have the filter in question. For doing some effects, I found that usage of "Dither Alpha" followed by "Alpha Blur" does a wonderful job of imitating chalk, and the Perspective Machine Tool is incredibly useful in this.

I'll just keep practicing and see what I can do!

Glad you like it. Should I do some sort of step-by-step tutorial thingy by saving every step of the way and annotating it?