Originally Posted by Nicho
I appreciate the criticism, but simply saying "these are all terrible" isn't acceptable to me, if you're going to add criticism, at least make it constructive. I don't mind that you find them terrible, I just think that if you're going to voice your dislike, then you should elaborate. Maybe provide a link to your work so I can see how a professional photoshopper does things. Thanks, Nicho....!
I am by no means a professional, as I've never done work in Photoshop that earned me any money. I have been using Photoshop since I was 13, and thoroughly enjoyed manipulating images for comedic purposes. These days I mainly use it for processing photos, where I rarely actually manipulate the photo, but rather just make it look better.
My most notable Photoshop is probably this one of president Obama, which got very popular on sites such as tumblr, reddit and 9gag. It was reblogged, liked and commented on over 75000 times on tumblr.
I do not consider it my best work though, and I can easily point out errors in it. I made it for a Photoshopping challenge on the site SomethingAwful, and also put it on my tumblr, where it exploded within a few days in popularity. The most interesting thing about the photo manipulation, is that a lot of people actually think that it is real.
All this said, I'll try to explain why I consider your work bad, or rather, uninteresting.
In this set of pictures, your source image is not particularly great (from a photographic point of view), and generally very uninteresting to anybody but the owner and dog fetishizers. The effect that you have used on the picture really doesn't add or improve anything, it's simply obnoxious and out of place.
Moving on to the polaroids, you have the same problem of the effect adding nothing to the original pictures. You also have some more technical problems, such as the polaroid film frames having no texture, the lack of a background, the polaroids don't cast shadows and the shots are perfectly aligned. All of these small problems come together to make the whole image look very unrealistic and lacking any real context, making it all very unappealing and boring.
The lack of a background is probably the most critical aspect.
The space image has massive light issues, poor colour contrasts and the background more or less looks like asphalt with white paint splotches on it. The stars shouldn't even be visible, when the two planets are exposed like that. The planet closer to the viewer looks fine though, so I suppose if you put that together on your own, then that's pretty well done.
I'm not sure I understand what you've changed in the single picture of that dog. Did you add human teeth?
The PSP/dog manipulation is cute, but the poor quality source images (the PSP and the game) ruin it. The game picture even has watermarks on it, which is pretty slobby. You could've cloned those out in less than 5 seconds, or found a better source image. On top of that, the PSP does not cast a shadow, and it has fuzzy edges. All these are issues that you could have rectified in a few minutes' extra work.
Your fingerpainting I can't really comment on, as this is not a Photoshop related matter. The background is obviously just a white brickwall with a plastic wrap filter thrown on it. You would've been better off without the filter, as I'm fairly sure the bricks mentioned in The Wall are not made of plastic. I could be wrong.
In other words, all the edits you've done don't really add anything to the original photos, and most of the time you just end up eliminating any value the source photos may have had. Generally when doing photo manipulation, you want to approach with the mindset of "what can I change, in order to make elements of this image better" rather than "how can I completely overhaul this image and create entirely new interesting values and aspects, that will justify the edit". Think small, be subtle.
edit: on closer inspection, those polaroid things do cast shadows. I think that might be why the background is black.
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