The 'Clone/Reveal' Tool, and other image manipulation.

This post will be showcasing the use of the clone/reveal tool in the 'Roto-paint' node, here is a picture of a man wearing sunglasses, the clone/reveal tool is going to be used to replace what is seen in the glasses.

The reflection here is strong, and is the centre-point of the photograph, therefore when the reveal tool is used, it must encompass the entirety of the glasses.


In horror films, directors seem to wish for more original ways in showing the villain on screen. Sometimes the protagonists watch themselves in a mirror and they see the horrors shamble up behind them. This is to change the circumstance of the picture just by using the clone/reveal tool, reveal being the tool used.

This is the picture that shall be used, of a group of zombies walking toward our victim.

(Wallpaper Vortex, 2011)

The true difficulty with finding the right picture for this shot, is trying to match the sunlight of our zombies to the light in the original photograph, so this was picture was used due to its similar brightness.

After transforming, reformatting, and slightly rotating the zombie picture in the background (A process used to move the picture around behind our original image), the reveal tool is in the roto-paint node to begin filling out the lenses in the glasses. After this is done, it seems to work fairly well, but the colour in the photo still does not feel entirely natural, and without having to know how to use colour correction at this stage, an easy substitute is to use saturation, and make the overall picture black and white.

The program that was used for the black and white is a similar program to photoshop,  called 'G.I.M.P' (GNU, Image Manipulation Program). This program was used to desaturate the picture. The luminosity was tweaked to at least give it some sort of brightness, by using the 'Curves' option, what this allows to be done is to make the picture black and white, but retain brightness in certain areas of the picture.

In all, not only is this good practice with the reveal tool, but it also shows how editing a photograph by using this simple reveal tool can change its meaning. Even more so, considering the compositor may not know how to use the colour correction, many artists prefer black and white in their photographs to create a different ambience and mood natural lighting gives.

Reference:

Wallpaper vortex, 2011-04-13 16:09:31, Zombie Crowd Wallpaper, accessed Sunday, October 14th 2012