>
> Many of my prints of rose flowers look stunning on metallic paper, and I
> have a metallic print from Wayne Harridge taken after sunset ( I think) in
> the
> Lake Mungo area which likewise draws much admiration from viewers
> (including me - thanks Wayne)
>
OK, let me be specific. I'm highly irritated by portraits on metallic. The
exception to this would be the one photograph I saw that was intended to
look like an old tintype--now that was ultra cool.
A pro-photographer friend of mine showed me a very nice set of metallic
portraits in his portfolio. At first glance it was great and I was highly
impressed by the "glow" it gave to the skintones--almost lifelike...
Now, granted, I get the execution thing, but I saw something that creeped me
out--something that would have occured with regular glossy too, but wow was
this freaky. The face indented! The longer I looked at the picture, the more
the face was concave on the print.
What happened in this specific case is that the skin was somewhat smoothed
in Photoshop using a standard smoothing procedure which most of us do, and
with the low-iso, high pixel-count noise-free image there was absolutely
nothing for the eye to focus on in the expanse of skin. Therefore all that
remained was tonal shading. The problem is that the specific lighting for
the shot caused the brightness levels to give the illusion that the print
was literally dented in the face--as though somebody hit the print with a
football (either type).
The more I looked at the print, the more wierded out I got. The lighting was
a standard key plus fill plus hairlight configuration. The hairlight gave
the impression of the top of the head was closer to you as was the
cheekbones which were lit by the high key light position. But then the not
highlight portions look sunk in. An optical illusion, but it's there.
Granted, this wasn't JUST because of metallic, but then I started looking at
other samples and the same thing was occuring on other prints too.
To illustrate this, think of a fully deflated soccerball. When completely
deflated it will bulge out on one side and the other side will be inverted
into a bowl shape. Now imagine that you are looking directly at the bowl
side with it lit by key-fill-hairlight lighting. That's what the print
looked like.
Part of the problem--if not the entire problem is that the print surface
itself has no texture to speak of and if there is no grain or texture in the
image itself you end up looking through the print a little because it is
very difficult for the eyes to focus directly on it--kinda like trying to
look at the surface of a clean mirror. All that remains is varying degrees
of brightness levels and the human eye is trained to identify 3D objects not
just through binocular vision but by decoding on light is reflecting off of
objects.
AG
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|