Out of the mists 8th street Avalon

[QuantumTyphoon]

I played around with multiple layers. I used a lot of masks for the clouds and mist. I took the picture of the store and the clouds.. Not of the man. I only masked in part of the mage and left most of the light from the picture I masked/cut it out of. Thing is the light on the mage doesn't match the rest of the picture, but I'm not sure how to do that without taking him out of the spotlight. Any suggestions or edits are fine by me, cool thanks.

 

[Argos]

Nice! But I think it's a bit confusing, you need to add the cloud effect only on the sky and then add mist on the store.

About the light on the man, you can add a light on that staff or add light from that direction on the floor for example. But I would lower the contrast on him a little bit.

Best regards

David.

 

[IamSam]

Glad to see you working on an idea. As David stated above, very confusing!

I truly apologize but I have to call them like I see them. You can't improve if you don't get a straight shot! Before I read the description, when I first look at an image I try to see what's being stated.

At first, I didn't even notice the little guy in the corner. All of my initial attention was focused on what was behind the soupy mix! Low and centered, I see Prairie Ink?????

Is this advertising for the Prairie Ink store?

Maybe this has something to do with the title? What is an 8th street Avalon? Mists? More confusion.

You say the little guy is a "mage"? What's he doing? Pointing the way to Prairie Ink store for tattoos?

This could be the entire image!


Nothing is really centered, clear and focused here.

So before I can offer any help, we need to start at the beginning with a simple question, what's the story, if any, are you trying to tell here?

 

[QuantumTyphoon]

Thanks ARgos and Iamsam. Your comments cover what was on my mind actually. The store you see is a bookstore. I attempted to use different pictures of clouds from my library of shots, but I can't seem to match the light with the different cloud sources and I can't seem to make clouds look like fog. Are there any filters out there that do a good job of creating fog? when I first saw prairie ink I thought it was tattoo's too, but why in a book store? It's actually a restaurant.

I went to the bookstore in the morning and took 3 different exposures of the store. I then combined them and tone mapped them. I opened up a cloud picture and added the clouds as another layer. But the "mist" on the bottom was the same cloud layer. I duplicated it and then stretched using the command key control T. I thought about giving up and cropping the scene down to the sorcerer and the prairie ink restaurant but that made no sense to me when the restaurant is in the bookstore. I then used dodge on the cloud layer to highlight the hand of the sorcerer. I planned on using a dragon to fight the mage for control of the shop. But I couldn't find any good sources for dragons.

And most of all there is a sign on the top of the store and it is held up by a cross pattern of steel. If you zoom in you can see part of McNally Robinson bookstore. That's alot of complicated masking. And I would have to mask it to place the clouds behind the store. Then my problem was how do I make or source a convincing layer of mist? And now writing it out just gave me the idea. Smoke in front of black paper would make it easier to mask the smoke then add to the picture for mist.

Does anyone know of a good source photo site of pictures of smoke in front of black paper? Or is there a brush and some setting I'm unaware of for painting mist?

 

[Argos]

My advice, try to use brushes for the mist instead of images. by using brushes you have a lot more control and options than searching for matching images.

 

[Argos]

I made a 5minut example using only brushes, so you can see what I mean. I used different types of brushes, on the layers name is the type of brush I used.

 

[QuantumTyphoon]

That's cool Argos. Do you know how to make your smoke look more like fog? Any hints? I suppose if I were to guess I would try using color correction/saturation and levels.

 

[Argos]

You mean a more natural fog like this image?


That could be more tricky and hard, and I think you would need to do some changes to your idea and image.

With this kind of fog, I think you need to forget about the clouds in the sky, the angle is too close to see any sky.

The most important thing to make this fog work and visible at night is the light, your image doesn't have a strong point of light, from what I see it has various soft sources of light coming from the store and you would need to see on images how the fog interact with the light and recreate it on every one of this sources.

But I'm imagining how I would do it, and maybe I'm overcomplicating a more simple idea that you had in your mind XD.