"Never underestimate the power of self talk which is the key that unlocks all the power of the Universe."
"I've been in the darkness for a long long time
and now I understood that there's a divine plan
to know my self and embrace this darkness
running away is what I call madness
This is the time
when I finally see
with my eyes wide open
I've always been free
Thank you solitude
for introducing me the void
I'm not afraid anymore
I can finally fill my soul"
The poem above is something I wrote to release myself from my own mental chains.
I had a long time since I enjoyed this much playing around with Photoshop and ONIRIC. It was very fun to create this cyberpunk composite and it is the first time in years that I really just play with pixels without feeling anxiety of posting or sharing art, for real, I feel that I was very deep trying to please society with my art and I got sick of it, my perception of my artistic self got distorted in ways I could never explain but some of you could relate.
The darkness made me evolve, now I rise from the ashes and I won't stop.
Thank you darkness, thank you void, you are the master who taught me the power of my soul.
Here you can see the RAW image with the skin retouch layer. Then I added a lot of dodge and burn which helps to give that CGI look to my images. I mostly use curves adjustment layers with SCREEN blend mode for the highlights and MULTIPLY blend mode to darken the areas. Dodge and burn is an amazing technique used by the gods of Photoshop since the beginning of the times, just kidding, but for real, dodge and burn is something used since Photoshop is alive and is a very fun way to give a lot of depth to an image.
Why glows are so important for me when creating this kind of composites?
Glows like bloom are an important factor that makes everything look more physically realistic and gives that sense of brightness on the areas where the glow is applied, something that happens in real life with the camera lenses, if a strong light source is being exposed to the sensor it gives this effect of diffused light that we call glow. I like to exaggerate this effect a little bit going out from the realistic to make the composite even more dramatic.
Glows are also an important FX that helps the integration of the elements within a composite, resulting into that homogeneous mixture of elements which makes feel that everything belongs to the same image.
To know more about the Oniric glow generate plugin I developed for Photoshop you can check out the landing page that we I in Composite Nation's website:
