Dark Knight

The picture above is the first style test where we use a composite image. I'll do a brief walk-through, showing how the picture was created.

The Borgholm Castle Ruin

The castle in the background is Borgholm Castle, a castle ruin just outside Borgholm on Öland, the 2nd largest Swedish island.

I removed the large rock, and masked out the sky, because I planned to replace it with something a bit more dramatic.

The knight is a toy I shot in a home made light box. The bright background is easy to mask out.

When we shoot the photo comic, we'll use live actors, but for a test like this, a toy works pretty well.

The sky is from an old photo. I collect photos of clouds, interesting textures, and various odds and ends that may come in handy when I create photo composites.

The picture above is a basic photo composite created in Pixelmator.

I have distorted the background sky, toned the whole picture to match the light reflected from the clouds, and increased contrast by duplicating the image, and changing the display mode of the top layer to Overlay.

This is what the image looks like after being converted with the Paintoscope filter.

I really liked the look of the axe, but the knight is way to dark.

The final step was to overlay the original picture over the Paintoscope version, change the blend mode to Luminosity, and reduce the transparency to about 45%. That brought out more detail in the knight, while keeping the overall look of a comic book drawing.

This is an early experiment, so the final comic look may be quite different. Still, at this stage in the project, I am quite happy with the look we've got.