Tom Mann
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Hi Pickone -
I'm running around like crazy today, but will give you a full explanation of the method I used either late tonight or early tomorrow AM, east coast USA time.
In the meantime, here are a couple of quick answers to your questions:
a) I didn't use any plugin(s), no cloning, no healing brush, no content aware fill based on the existing "real" reflections, or anything like that. I simply cut out an area (above the shoreline, including the sky) that I was interested in, flipped and re-positioned it (as everyone else did), and followed that by my own mix of techniques (that I'll describe later tonight). Other than eyeballing the surrounding areas to visually match brightness, color, lengths of the stretched blurs, etc. I made absolutely no use of the surrounding "real" reflections.
b) re: "TJM simulated" - "TJM" is my initials; "simulated" refers to the fact that these were the ones I constructed "from zero". On the annotated version that I posted, I needed a short caption to distinguish which reflections were "mine" (ie, that I constructed from zero), and which areas were the "real" reflections (ie, that appeared in your original photograph). I wanted to have my simulated reflections be directly alongside the real ones so that they could be easily compared.
c) You keep mentioning displacement maps. FYI, my technique does not use these.
d) Your photo has a small, but significant amount of lens flare around each bright light. This is most easily seen as the circular halo that surrounds the red lights on the smokestacks. For a reason which I'll explain later, it turns out that this is what causes simulated reflections to be slightly wider (left-right) than the real reflections. I did not deal with this in the image I already posted, but for full realism, it should be taken into account. After we discuss the basics, if you want, I can show you how to deal with this as well.
More later,
Tom
I'm running around like crazy today, but will give you a full explanation of the method I used either late tonight or early tomorrow AM, east coast USA time.
In the meantime, here are a couple of quick answers to your questions:
a) I didn't use any plugin(s), no cloning, no healing brush, no content aware fill based on the existing "real" reflections, or anything like that. I simply cut out an area (above the shoreline, including the sky) that I was interested in, flipped and re-positioned it (as everyone else did), and followed that by my own mix of techniques (that I'll describe later tonight). Other than eyeballing the surrounding areas to visually match brightness, color, lengths of the stretched blurs, etc. I made absolutely no use of the surrounding "real" reflections.
b) re: "TJM simulated" - "TJM" is my initials; "simulated" refers to the fact that these were the ones I constructed "from zero". On the annotated version that I posted, I needed a short caption to distinguish which reflections were "mine" (ie, that I constructed from zero), and which areas were the "real" reflections (ie, that appeared in your original photograph). I wanted to have my simulated reflections be directly alongside the real ones so that they could be easily compared.
c) You keep mentioning displacement maps. FYI, my technique does not use these.
d) Your photo has a small, but significant amount of lens flare around each bright light. This is most easily seen as the circular halo that surrounds the red lights on the smokestacks. For a reason which I'll explain later, it turns out that this is what causes simulated reflections to be slightly wider (left-right) than the real reflections. I did not deal with this in the image I already posted, but for full realism, it should be taken into account. After we discuss the basics, if you want, I can show you how to deal with this as well.
More later,
Tom