Just playing around with text effects and color grading.

[Shindigs 1,771]

Kinda surprised how well turning the background into night worked. Considering the actual image I used was taken in the middle of the day.

[SlapshotWrangler 864]

Review: Love the neon lights and they interact with the person in the photo so well. It really looks natural how the light adds a glow to the person's face as if the light is really physically there. The neon text also looks really cool overall and stands out from the gorgeous background of the city in the night. I have never considered how good green and blue looks in a piece with the night displayed like this. The snow particles are well incorporated and are a neat little detail. There is so much I like about this and I think this is one of my favourite pieces on the site. I guess my only complaint is that I wish the player render was a bit larger; to me I personally find it odd that it is small and hushed away at a corner. 9/10

[Shindigs 1,771]

1 hour ago, SlapshotDragon said:

Review: Love the neon lights and they interact with the person in the photo so well. It really looks natural how the light adds a glow to the person's face as if the light is really physically there. The neon text also looks really cool overall and stands out from the gorgeous background of the city in the night. I have never considered how good green and blue looks in a piece with the night displayed like this. The snow particles are well incorporated and are a neat little detail. There is so much I like about this and I think this is one of my favourite pieces on the site. I guess my only complaint is that I wish the player render was a bit larger; to me I personally find it odd that it is small and hushed away at a corner. 9/10

Thank you so much for the kind words, though since this is a .com you can't actually claim that review.

 

For the render size, basically I was just playing around with a font tutorial with no intent of actually making it a VHL graphic, but wanted to test it on a background so just threw in the Bratislava skyline (like I always do lol). So I was like "Meh, guess if I throw in Bo it will be league related". But the only render I had on hand that made sense was the suit one, which as it happens is pretty small for this canvas size. I could have upscaled it a bit since it's not like it's super amazing quality to begin with, but doing so always blocked so much of the text that it really started being difficult to actually read what it said. Offsetting the text was an option but it started cutting off the neon glow against the edge of the canvas too much. So just went with this.

 

For the incorporation of the lighting on the render, it's basically two techniques combined. The first is to just make a selection of the background* based on the render, then expanding the selection by 5 px and copying that selection. Moving it on top of the render, selecting the render again, contracting the selection by 5 px and deleting everything inside the selection on the new "background copy" layer. This gives you a 10 px "overlap" of background in front of the render. Then you make that layer a clipping mask to the render, set the blend mode to screen / color dodge for bright images or overlay / soft light for darker images. Then you apply "enough" gaussian blur to it to make it look natural. That adds the "light bleed" to the edges. Usually you'll also need to add a layer mask to this and go over it with a soft brush to remove the light bleed/make it less intense in dark areas.

 

The second is relatively similar, you copy the background put it above the render in the layer stack. Apply gaussian blur until you lose all shapes but still have the individual colors. Then make it a clipping mask, change blending mode to color and set the opacity in the 25-35% range. That way you get the same effect of being in ambient light of the same color as the background.* Finally I just did a normal color grading to add more blues and greens to everything, which helped further with making the lighting pretty coherent.

 

Even with doing that though, I felt that the green light on the left side of Bo's head wasn't really intense enough, so I ended up making 3 different layers that I just pained by hand, one that gave the relatively subtle green lighting of his temple / left side of his beard, one with the more intense green rim light, and another off-white layer for the highlights of the rim light.

 

*In both cases since, I wanted the neon lighting to also be "in the background" for this purpose, so I selected the layer below the render and hit ctrl+alt+shift+e to create a merged copy of that layer and all layers below it. To use as the "background" for this purpose.