You said that you wouldn't know where to begin when adding ghosts, but you've done compilations, so this thread might help spark some ideas. I started with a really bad but atmospheric photo taken inside a winery (second floor of the Coppola winery is a museum). One corner had a seacaptain's desk and telescope and a lot of dust. Shaky hands and semi-dark. Right.

While attempting to salvage it, I tried various things in PhotoShop to sharpen, brighten, clarify... but no luck. So I ranged into the texturing stuff, like "plasticwrap", "pastels", "find edges"... and "patchwork".

:wide evil grin:

Patchwork added a nice homespun look, it became warmer and more interesting. All I needed was to tweak the settings once I had my ghost.

I don't give up easily.

Message edited on: 10/28/2005 02:39

For ghosts, you can use a stencil if you just want an outer glow or glittering edge. Or you can use a fully dressed figure.

At this point I wanted to "play" with effects. It saves much time later! If all I needed was a silhouette, why fight with textures? Do I want a naked body, a dressed body, a face? Dead and expressionless or dead and not-very-happy-about-it-at-all?

PhotoShop has filters, layer effects, and blending modes, so there are LOTS of ways to get a super-imposed shape on a background to appear vague and ghostly. You can also blur, liquify, reduce opacity.

The shape can be cut from another photo, torn from paper and scanned, or rendered in a modeling program. If you have a figure on a black background, layer it on your scene using various blending modes, and the black will vanish... so you might not even have to cut out around your model. :) RDNA has some ghosts on .psd layers in this month's free festival, so there are even ready-made ghosts looking for a home.

Here are some "ghost tests". At this point, I was willing to try out odd colors, too. Who says ghosts have to be green or blue? Why not lavender or orange? The important thing at this point is to try even the wilder combinations... you never know what will spark that recognition factor.

Message edited on: 10/28/2005 02:54

I decided that I really did need to use a fully-dressed ghost. I went with a wedding effect (much more pathetic), and thought up a bit of story (it is easier for me to draw someone if I have given them an identity) but needed to test veils vs just hair, sleeves vs gloves, and get a sense of what sort of angle to go for. Once I knew that it was "curtains" for the bride (sniff), I knew where to place her... and that I'd have to postwork the photo to get a bit of lift from the real ones. More quick renders. Again, this does save time... if you are just going to show the face coming out of a wall, you don't need to check the clothes for poke-through). If you are going to blend with some element (dryad coming out of a tree, for example) you can test to see whether you want a front view or profile or whether a raised arm should echo a limb.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1077964&Start=1&Sectionid=1&filter_genre_id=0&WhatsN

The final figure was resized, and rendered in Poser (digital models don't complain and they are available to pose even at 3 a.m.) I used the smudge tool and liquify to get her dress blowing right, and did some postwork on skin (to remove the tattoos on her breasts) and blend the hair. A live off-the-street model would probably have a tattoo showing, too... but not a hundred years ago! A virgin bride would probably have had loose hair under the veil... and common daisies might emphasize a class difference (drapers used to be exceedingly wealthy). Little things, but they help give direction when pulling a scene together. "Color dodge" was warmer and more contrasty than screen or overlay or soft light as a blending mode. If I wanted to sepia-tone this image, I'd have gone with screen mode to preserve details (the image in #4 is actually full color: her "ice witch" texture and wedding dress were next best to monochromatic), but I really liked the nubbiness and warmth of dodging over a textured background. She wouldn't be perfect, but interesting. Because she was on her own layer, I could move her around to see how it affected the composition. Sometimes I'll have dozens of layers in an image! The ability to group them into sets helps... and you can always turn off visibility or link parts so they'll move together. There is an orange glow around her to help anchor the figure to the ground... spread wide with reduced opacity so that it is just barely hinted at. I don't know about GIMP, but I think that PSP has the same sort of layers that PhotoShop does. You don't need to buy a bunch of expensive plugins (this was compiled in PhotoShop 6). I make a bunch of my own layer styles (mostly for frames and titles) and save off the better ones as starting points. So, if you have a program with layers, you can duplicate your figure and try various effects and see what has potential. You can isolate part of the image and have the effect just apply to that part (say that your model is holding an unstoppered perfume bottle: you can cut out the bottle and give it an inner glow which doesn't affect anything else in the image). And, if you have blending modes, you can do all sorts of neat things. With multiple undos, or saving under different names at key points, you don't even need to worry about making a mistake. The biggest worry after messing around with a photograph is whether you can still put it in the Photography Gallery, or whether it needs to go under 2D or something. If all I have done is change the hue of the pixels (upping the contrast, or sepia-toning, or minor clean-up), I'll tuck it into Photography. I think that multiple exposures and compilations would be ok there, too, since some folks do eclipses or sports photos showing the sequence... as long as it still looked like a photograph. If I have filtered it so that neighboring pixels are affected, and it now looks like a painting, well... we do have a choice of galleries, too. ;) HTH, Carolly PS: for anybody not knowing what this was leading up to, the final image is at the link