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Thread: Shadows

  1. #1
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    My polerizing filter arrived, and I took a few test pictures. It worked great for the mussel shells, but the white plastic garbage bag supported by bamboo sticks stuck into a piece of styrofoam worked better for photographing shell to get good color. I painted out the mussel background, and created two tracing models. One for the group of shells, and one for the shadows. I like to effect of clipping the image, but needed to separate the shadows for application of transparency. The traces were a little rough, and I did some shape editing. For the shell group, I set the object to red and applied transparency. This worked good for editing the shape to the image. Afterwards, clip view was applied to the shell group and the group object mask. The shadows were edited, too. I made some of the shadows manually, and set them to transparent so they would appear to be more natural. Rich
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Name:	Mussels.jpg 
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  2. #2
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    Fantastic image!
    I have a problem following you're explanations tho. Would it be possible to give us a step by step rundown?
    Egg
    Egg

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  3. #3
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    The shells were layed out on a piece of white foam board in full sun. I took several pictures of various shells to get several sets with shadows. I didn't think Xara X could predict the shadows from the clipping object that I was going to create, and decided to make an object for the shells and one for the shadows. I painted the background to grey.
    This makes the irregularities between the object and image less apparent later on. I also use masking and inverted mask to create a two color image for auto tracing. I made two images, one of the shells for the clipping of the shells, and one of the shadows to auto trace. It would have been more easy to manually trace from the start, but I was testing this method. So, I had created a grey and white image of the area of the shells, and the areas of the shadows. Auto traces gave two sets of vector objects. The traces were not real exact, and I used the shape editor to fix the objects. Basically, I filled the object to red and set some transparency. This was overlayed onto the image so that the object could be fitted to the image. I did this with both sets. Once the object was close enough, I moved it behind the image and did a clip view. This made the shell image available without a background. The shadow objects were aligned to the clipped image, and transparency applied. This allowed the background image to show through as if the shells were actually sitting on it. I did have a few problems with my Golden Retriever hauling the shell off while trying to take pictures. A step I had not mentioned before. Rich

  4. #4
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    Another example. Rich
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  5. #5
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    I made a copy of the cliping object for the shadow. Rich
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Name:	flower_shadow.jpg 
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  6. #6
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    The image was traced, and a solid background layer was removed leaving the shadows. I tried to edit the colors using Xcolor, but the shadows were all 80% black. Then I overlayed the shadows onto the image and adjusted the shadow transparency and color. Rich
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Name:	colored_sand.jpg 
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  7. #7
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    Light travels in waves and should bend around the object so that the shadow is darker near the object, and then becomes lighter as the light fills back in. I didn't see this effect in the image because it was very subtle, however it was apparent in the trace. Xara X was sensitive to the color difference and showed the progression. My system couldn't handle the trace do to memory limitations, and I went to a clipview to reduce the file size. The shadow was created as a separate object. I added a linear fill, set some transparency, and made a couple of clones. Rich
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Name:	strawberry.jpg 
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