Ryan wrote Hey, this looks amazing, keep up the great work

Buji wrote Do you know what, there's some aspect I love about this. The absolute chaos makes it beautiful. But as a designer there's always room for improvement! I think separation is key here, where the lower part meets the window, seems to disappear at the middle of the window. I myself am terrible at photo manipulating so I know for a fact that there was a lot of time involved into this. I do try to avoid constructive criticism as people take it differently and I hate to hurt peoples feelings. They're other aspects that weird out my brain like the shadow character. It appears at an angle that shouldn't exist. Kinda gives me toy story vibes. However, where the sky meets the window is stunning! Keep it up Zeus! You got the name I wanted ;)

Glad to see a new designer coming to the forums!

Zef wrote

Howdy, just an old timer here figured I could give you some points to look out for. I like the story tale concept and overall this has a good base!

When making a photo manipulation the goal is to create a completely irregular image but to make it look as if were real. I like the placement of the waterfall effects on the dining set in the middle but you can remove unwanted artifacts to make those areas POP with just a bit of detailed masking!

When selecting stocks to use and combine you want to either choose images that are stylized the same or edit them to match a single style. Your base stock is photoreal because well its a photo lol. The stocks you added are VERY stylized and I am quite sure the bottom one is a digital painting. I would spend some time making the base window/room stock into a more stylized visual. Adding some posterization effects and some paint brush texture would help wrap the overall style together with what you've done already.

I see you did a soft blend to combine the bottom image over the base stock, I would recommend having 2 copies of the bottom stock. One being soft blended to help with color flow and dark areas, another version masked with harder edges making some of the elements that sit forward appear forward. You can always cut bits and pieces of the same image in the same place and stack them to show the depth level you're looking for like the chair in the foreground.

The ambient lighting is done pretty well! I would recommend doing a bit of leveling/color correction between layers (use the adjustment effects) on each layer to get a base darkness/saturation/gamma situation that is the same across the board. Once all your tones are in check then boost with ambient lighting and color filters.

You did a good job of cleaning up of the artifacts that wouldn't make sense with the manipulation in the base pic, just keep that energy rolling on the next one across all layers and you will achieve a nice well rounded believability.

This is constructive criticism on some things to look for on your next piece, feel free to DM me if you want any advice or help on how to achieve any of these things. Always happy to help!

Cheers on the design!

-Zef

Antiglio wrote oh shit that's sick