[Kev Holloway]

Hey Mike,

Thanks for the reply – I realise that there’s a lot of things it could be, but mostly it’s down to my inexperience.

I tried quite a few – h.264 looked really pixelated, and photo JPEG (which wasn’t as bad – I’ve used it in the past) did the same. It was really apparent on the text.

In all I tried:

Animation, H.264, Sorenson, Photo JPEG, uncompressed, DV/DVCPRO, None, Video.

All were either huge (25-30GB) or horrible quality.

I ended up going with a wmv file and posting to Vimeo, so it looks like problem solved. It’s here https://www.vimeo.com/14498099 in case anyone wants to get an idea of what I was working with.

I’ll reply to this thread if I ever figure it out – no doubt the problem is between chair and keyboard.

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[Kev Holloway]

My 2 cents:

Aside from the compositing the people/QB/sky, I think the look is pretty much down to lighting and RAW development.

Assuming you get the lighting right, in Lightroom (I’m sure PS has the same controls, it’s just not in my workflow), jack up the contrast and clarity, then use the fill light and blacks controls to clip/compress the image a bit. You can use exposure to adjust a bit if pushing up the blacks clips too much of the image. Drop the saturation relative to how much more contrast you add.

Then use HSL to fine tune – bumping blue/aqua saturation can look great if the clothes are those colors (while dropping the rest), and you can fine tune the tonal range of the skin by playing with red/orange/yellow luminance.

I’m not saying that’s how that one was done, but it might get you in the ball park for the painted shiny look. Oh, and when you’re done in PS, duplicate the layer (or stamp), and set this new layer to Filter->other->high pass with a value between 3 and 8, and change the blending mode to soft light (or hard light if you want to mask it back).

Hope that helps.

[Kev Holloway]

Hey Robert,

Is “Shape Dynamics” ticked in your brushes pallete?