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Charting the Crucible
David of Mac
Elite RangerCa
This picture was inspired by a shot in early season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, where [i]Galactica[/i] emerges from behind a cloud in a nebula, looking for all the world like a seaship emerging from a fogbank. I decided some time ago that the movie-era [i]Enterprise[/i] would be a perfect ship for my own take on the shot, given that it's my favorite spaceship and that it's long, sleek profile means it'd fit well in the aspect ratio I normally use.
The nebula background (and foreground) was a composite of four photos of clouds I've taken over the years (and anyone who's ever seen me while I'm holding a camera can tell you that I photograph a [i]lot[/i] of clouds), colored, mixed, and generally fussed with in Photoshop. I did a good deal of fiddling with the bloom and fog depth effects on the ship as well, until I was happy with them. I quite like the colors in this picture, and it's one of my new favorites. And any day I can look at a picture and think "new favorite" is a good day.
As for the narrative of the image, all I can say is, it's not from The Wrath of Khan. It's a nice, peaceful image of the starship [i]Enterprise[/i] exploring another, completely unrelated nebula. I know it looks like the nebula from The Wrath of Khan but, well, it's not. Because I said so.
[url=http://homepage.mac.com/david_of_mac/.Pictures/Stargate/charting_the_crucible.jpg]Image[/url]
The nebula background (and foreground) was a composite of four photos of clouds I've taken over the years (and anyone who's ever seen me while I'm holding a camera can tell you that I photograph a [i]lot[/i] of clouds), colored, mixed, and generally fussed with in Photoshop. I did a good deal of fiddling with the bloom and fog depth effects on the ship as well, until I was happy with them. I quite like the colors in this picture, and it's one of my new favorites. And any day I can look at a picture and think "new favorite" is a good day.
As for the narrative of the image, all I can say is, it's not from The Wrath of Khan. It's a nice, peaceful image of the starship [i]Enterprise[/i] exploring another, completely unrelated nebula. I know it looks like the nebula from The Wrath of Khan but, well, it's not. Because I said so.
[url=http://homepage.mac.com/david_of_mac/.Pictures/Stargate/charting_the_crucible.jpg]Image[/url]
Comments
Jake
Yeah, I was thinking about mentioning that there would be six hours of scheduled downtime as part of the iPhone software release, but decided, hey, how many people are going to try to click the link within that window verses how many are going to see that disclaimer in all the hours after where everything was working fine.
Anyway, the first thing I did was put in the foreground cloud. I cut it out using a layer mask that I made from selecting the color of the sky, because there was a pretty clean division and I'm far, far too lazy to matte by hand when I don't absolutely have to. I used an adjustment layer to give it it's color, and then another photo of a sunset to break up its color a little. I used the same layer mask to block out these two layers, as well as the bloom layer for the ship.
For the bottom layer of the background nebula, I started with a light, whispy photo of clouds, with the opacity turned down a smidge so the black background layer would darken it up a little. Then came an adjustment layer the same color as the one for the foreground cloud, with this one set to "Linear Burn" in the blending mode to darken it up, and the "Blend if" box in the blending options being set to reduce the blending as the underlying layer got brighter. This set off the clouds in that picture more from the sky. I used the same sunset again to alter the color of this part of the clouds in the next layer up, this one set to "Vivid Light." The topmost layer was another sunset photo, with smooth bands of red clouds, that I placed in the upper right to help justify the red light on the top of the ship. That one was matted in with a layer mask as well, with much tweaking of its levels so the red part would show up but not the sky behind it.
After I'd done all this, I still didn't feel like it was quite done. Eventually, I realized what was missing and ran back to Lightwave to render out a depth pass of the ship using the Render Buffer Export. I used that as a layer mask on the ship layer, which helped sell that it was traveling through a gaseous medium (it's most apparent where you can see the foreground warp engine overlap the background one, but it affected the whole ship.) The topmost layer was a merged version of the image, with a filmgrain-and-blur applied, and then darkened substantially with levels, and set to about 50% opacity.