Kind of a different topic, but related. Since I also work in the CG industry, this interests me, too, as CG images get more and more photorealistic. Here’s a fun quiz to see if you can tell which images are photographs, and which are computer-generated. I only got 8 out of 12, but I tend to second-guess myself a lot when the image looks pretty convincing. Most of them really do look like photographs.  How well can you do?

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/fakeorfoto/challenge/

Here’s a new magazine baby announcement with a football theme to it. It involved cutting the baby out of the background, and pasting him onto another image of a football field.

Here are a few more things I had to do:

• Color adjustments to both the baby and the background to integrate them better. There’s a warming filter added to both, as a start.
• Made a blurred version of the baby’s skin (using PS’s Surface Blur) on a new layer, and then painted a mask to let it come through on the smoother areas. It does 2 things: 1) gets rid of little baby acne-type stuff and skin imperfections, and 2) adds kind of a glow to the skin.
• Carved off his right (left on the image) shoulder so it didn’t just end abruptly in the middle of the picture. I just made the mask so that it rounded off that edge more.
• Sharpened the baby image and blurred the background image. Since the background image was actually more in focus than the baby by default, I did some blurring on the background to make it feel farther away.

As always, go to the gallery to see a bigger version of this and other examples!