^^^
Oh my...
Well, this second take is improved. You are quite correct to say the
Enterprise here is too poor an image to improve. And I would suggest grading down the other images to match it, rather than trying to somehow grade up the spaceship. Which it looks like you've done. Only I would suggest a gaussian blur to the planet image before adding the film grain noise.
And, I wasn't trying to throw stones from my glass house (from which I love the view, but damn, window washers are expensive!). Just offering some constructive criticism. And I actually completely agree that the image of mine you posted is also quite poorly done. I much prefer the pictures of that ship against the star field. Also you have to understand those are pictures of a 12 inch long model I built that I took with my cell phone under really sub-par lighting. Certainly just a fun experiment. Here's one I think turned out a lot better.
...and even that ain't perfect. All I have is cell phone and a couple desk lamps. I'm slowly trying to gather better and better equipment to take better shots and make better composites, but I, too am teaching myself.
But let's look at my image you posted the detail of:
The lighting is pretty off here. The main light source is the hyperspace tunnel, and the so the brightest light really ought to be on the ship's side, rather than it's top. I could have corrected this by rotating this ship element to face the brightly lit side towards the light source, but I felt it would make the ship look like it was careening through the tunnel at a bizarre and uncomfortable angle. I suppose I could move around the hyperspace to reposition the focus of the tunnel, but this image was pieced together from really just a quarter tube of crumbled aluminum foil and took a lot of work to fill up that specific rectangle, and would have taken even some more work to reformat it all to a totally different position within that rectangle. Frankly, not worth the effort to me for an image that was just a fun experiment done late one night as a lark. Also, again, I feel the edge is SO badly done because of it being too sharp versus the quality of the image it is the edge of. In fact, it was this very image that taught me the principle I was trying to convey to you that a blurry image needs a blurry edge. If I were going to re-composite this Class-A Freighter image (which I'm not going to) I would re-cut it out of its background with the pen tool set to have a 1 pixel feather edge. That would go far in improving it. As would going over some of the even blurrier bits and softening the edges even more by hand, probably with a soft eraser brush set to 20 or 30% opacity.
In case you're curious, here's the image of the model with no doctoring at all. (probably... there are two from the same angle and I forget which I actually used.)
Another lesson I learned from this experiment is to photograph against a different background... the black made isolating the image a bit of a pain in the butt. Had I shot this against blue, the whole thing would have looked a lot better.
Lighting is a huge deal and you really have to get it right with the model. Trying to paint it in
post facto can be done, but really just to punch it up here and there. Trying to make the light source look like it's coming from the completely other side is no longer compositing. Now you doing a digital painting. Which is cool. That's super fun also. The key is to understand the physical form of what you're "lighting" and also remember that light only goes (for our purposes) in straight lines. Here's the problem of your painted-in light in your composite: The sun is way behind the ship, so really it would be acting more as a rim light, just brightening the edges. Even if you are cheating it over with your artistic licence, it's not behaving as light does. None of your added sunlight should spill onto the bottom of the saucer at all, but it should show up on the nacelles and engineering hull, which it doesn't.
This is part of why the CBS image in your OP fails. The model itself isn't great, but from so far away, we can't really tell that in this image. The problem is 100% in the subtlety of the lighting. Now the strong key light from our upper right is good. And it even matches the shadow on the planet, so our brains are tricked into thinking, "yeah, sunlight!." And then there's a much dimmer fill light probably rigged below and aft of the ship; it has a cooler blue color and we can think, "sure, that's light bouncing off Earth and showing us the under side." Now in real life, being that far away, any reflected light would have far, far less visible impact on a ship like we see here, but most of us have only lived on the surface of Earth and we don't think of what light really does in space, and for artistic reasons, we can let the strong fill light slide. After all, our "ship of a thousand suns" was lit with a TON of fill light back in the 60s. But, to be fair, the net effect of the lighting was that the ship basically seemed to be lit from one side. Here's where CBS dropped the ball: the edge lighting on the saucer (our left hand side of frame) has a bright highlight. And then the starboard warp nacelle also gets an edge highlight, but from another mysterious angle, yet the secondary hull doesn't seem to get much highlight at all. All these weird light sources are where you can see it's not a solid model. It's subtle, and most of us probably can't quite identify why it's wrong, but it is wrong and it throws enough of us off that we say, "psh! What crappy CGI!" Our brains are so used to seeing light do as light does all day long in real life that when we see it misbehaving, it makes us a little crazy. So, that's why lighting angles really matter. And besides all the weird angles, the fact that there are all these magically invisible light sources in space make the thing look that much more fake as well. We see toys on desktops reflect light from every angle. The effect is to subtly cue your brain that you are seeing a very small object, because very large objects, well, look differently. The CBS guys were likely making another artistic decision, hoping to show us all the ship's form and curves, but their method in doing so was unrefined and really, seems not well thought out..
Enough of my wind-bagging. I think taking your challenge could be fun. Post each of the elements you used (the
Enterprise, the Earth, and the starfield) and I will try to composite them myself and we can compare results.
To action!
--Alex
Spockboy
