[Chapel]

Ok, I've spent the last hour on this.. I had some trouble with the neck and the collar.. and I didn't get the hair exact, but I think I did pretty good.



Oh and I thought I did pretty good with the signature too.

[This message has been edited by Chapel (edited September 28, 2000).]

[ThE_JacO]

hmmm i'm by far a friggin newbie in here (one of the few things i'm sure in life ;P ) but i'v some experience in prepress, photography and all the related photoshop work. if i have to be honest i'm convinced it's all just pic editing or overpainting (with the photo layer under the painting semi transparent, i used that too a lot for quick tests ).
Though i wouldn't swear on it and also would be glad if pierre could give me a reason to be in the selfflagelling apologizin' crowd

EDIT: i just saw a photo of a townstreets that's supposedly done in acrylics... it presents all the artifacts that JPG usually generates on photos and not the ones usually generated on something presenting a brush stroke texture.

my best wishes to proove us all wrong but it seems an hipotesys growing more remote by the minute =)

EDIT2: in your site in the part about 3D u also say a polygon can be open or closed, u clearly need to revise ur geometry skills, if one poly could be open u wouldn't need a minimum of 3 sides, also what u define as edges are sides, edges happen when u have more polys sharing the sames sides (infact one of innovations about XSI is the so called edge control added to the more normal CVs, tech that mirai implemented some time ago already).

i can't pretend to have any authority to speak about 2D in here with the monsters present in this forum but ur 3D skills are a big fat flop man =)

[This message has been edited by ThE_JacO (edited September 28, 2000).]

[Sc00p]

Hmm...Humanclay, posting proof IS a good idea...so why not do that for some of your old marker renderings you did a long time ago? I think I saw them in a book if I'm not mistaken :)

[Guy]

personaly i can see that pierre's stuff is painted. the pic with the 2 cars does at first look like a photo, but looking at it closer it does look painted. still wouldnt mind seeing a larger pic of it though

EDIT 1: ok hold on a sec!.. the middle pic on the top row on the main page cant be acrylic.. looks WAY to much like a photo. im sorry, but now im not sure any more

[This message has been edited by Guy (edited September 28, 2000).]

[Visigoth]

This has got to be one of the finest examples of Threnodizing I've ever seen...lol... I have to hand it to him... A couple of the city-scape photos look like they weren't edited at all...Just taken with really bad 35mm film and scanned...Notice in the pic of the model car, looking out the window, the dust/scratches on the film...?

------------------
Your car is a fiberglass penis extension.

[Seph|roth]

Well guys, i first saw this thread this afternoon when no one had replied to it yet. I thought i was being nuts and insanely jealous cuz it looked as if he his work was too good to be true..
I thought i was flipping out but i see now that im not the only one who thought they were really pictures with added effects/filters and slight modifications in photoshop. I might still be wrong but that pic with the buildings, im sorry, is no way painted. Its obviously a picture...and if im wrong then i will apologize like the rest here. But if its really a picture, its shameful. It really pisses me off to see how some people are ready to take credit where it is not due. Everyone here works really hard to improve and to see a something fake like that right in your face...
It just bothers me..
Anyway, like i said before, if those are really painted then you are probably the best painter ive seen in my life, and ill gladly appologize, but i highly doubt it.

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- Seph -
Listen Without Prejudice

[dr . bang]

I can't wait to see the proof

[pierre]

quick sketch I just finished. Took me about half an hour.
http://www.crosswinds.net/~pierrehannah/forum/face.jpg

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http://www.crosswinds.net/~pierrehannah

[Seph|roth]

Uhm, did u do the face or just the doodling around it ?
Im not too sure but the face kinda looks like a blurred up picture..
Anyways, if u did the face then good stuff, but a lil blurred, but take out all that stuff around it.

------------------
- Seph -
Listen Without Prejudice

[pierre]

The areas that are blurred are areas of my own sketching that I blurred. I worked out face with hard brushes, very sloppy, and blurred it, used hard brushes again, blurred it again, and so on.....that is why it has blurred areas.

Since it is a sketch, I feel there is no need to take away the hard areas around it.

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http://www.crosswinds.net/~pierrehannah

[n8]

ok...hang on people...dont dismiss him yet, we still have to see what he does with mikes picture...if he gets that down packed then im sure we can all say "yay, he wasnt bullshitting"..to me it looks like photo manipulation. O yeah, one more thing, if he is really that good, who does he work for??
and whats an artifact??...ill assume its the little blotches of a bunch of diff colours when the picture when it goes digital ....
is it real??...who knows

[n8]

okok...now i really dont believe him

if that dont work drag this to ur thingie http://www.crosswinds.net/~pierrehannah/paintings/works/worksrez/buildings.jpg

[ThE_JacO]

Sepi: initially i was tempted not to comment too to not appear jealous (and i wasn't sure myself if i was effectively right or just flippin' out), but on a second thought i see tons of stuff everyday here from spooge, fred, liquid, even ppl less considered then they are like Rinaldo are extremely good. If i was moved by professional jealousy or envy i shouldn't open this site or goodbrush.com for the rest of my life hell i shouldn't even open photoshop anymore prolly and leave softimage in favor of corel3D if i had to hate anybody who's better then me

[Chapel]

I think the only way he is going to be able to change anyones opinion is to actually show us a psd file from scratch. Or post pics through a process. I can duplicate mickes b&w pics in about 5 minutes if I really wanted. That task isn't that hard. Now duping one of his paintings that is a different story. (micke I'm not saying your b&w stuff is simple, its just line work is easy for me to copy.)

[SushiMaster]

n8, "artifacts" are not caused by scanning an image into a "digital" format (ie any format on the computer). There's different formats, however... and they differ in quality and in the space they take up on the hard drive.

BMP, or TGA, or PSD are all lossless formats - ie they keep all the information they're given. They try to compress it, but only in a "perfect" way: when you decompress you get exactly the same as what you started with. As a result they take up quite a lot of space on your hard drive and are not very suitable for the web.

GIF and JPG are not lossless. GIF reduces the number of colours to 256, so that each pixel (each dot in the picture) takes only one byte. Usually, lossless formats can take up to 3 bytes for each pixel. Also, having 1 byte per pixel allows to compress more easily when you have large areas of the same colour. Say you have a whole row of 100 pixels of the same colour, you won't need a 100 bytes for that, but just 2 bytes: one to give the colour, and one to tell it to repeat that 100 times.

JPEG is a bit more complicated, in that it approximates the picture in terms of "areas" or "bits" of one colour or another (actually each area can take on gradients as well!). The more you raise the compression, the smaller the bits are, the more detailed the resulting picture is. Still, jpeg tends to produce those "artifacts" around text, for instance (and other things), even at a fairly reasonable compression.

But that doesn't have anything to do with it being a photo. You can paint a line in a file and if you compress it too much, you'll see JPEG artifacts where the compression was not good enough...

Hope this helped!

Daniel

[Frost]

SushiMaster: One little note to clarify things since you mentioned it, GIF is lossless compression made for 8bit (256 color) or less images. You need to convert the image to 256 color or less for a program to save a GIF. That's all. =) (I've been using GIF for so many years and I'm fond of the format for pixeled artwork, so I felt like I needed to defend it, hehe.=)

Oh, and the method of compression you mentioned (Run-Length Encoding) as 'GIF' is not entirely true, but is a small part of the subset of the compressions used. GIF use a compression scheme called Lempel-Ziv (if I remember correctly), where it keeps tracks of previous encoded bytes, and when a matching string is found, it writes an index to that string and the length of the match, stored in bit-wise information, not byte-aligned, so you might have 12-bit string indexing and 4-bit length descriptor which stores an entire (up to 16 pixels) pixel string (in the last 4096 bytes previously read and encoded in the file) in 2 bytes. This is just an example, but the GIF compressor is slightly more complexe and optimized. It's somewhat simular to some of the compression algorythms used in ZIP files and such.

(oh, you touched by geeky coder side, I jsut had to talk about it. I actually coded my own version of such a file compressor in C some 4 years ago, and it gave results which where slightly (8% or so) bigger than GIF, oh well.)

cheers,
frost.

[This message has been edited by Frost (edited September 29, 2000).]

[ThE_JacO]

quote:

---

Originally posted by SushiMaster:
n8, "artifacts" are not caused by scanning an image into a "digital" format (ie any format on the computer). There's different formats, however... and they differ in quality and in the space they take up on the hard drive.

BMP, or TGA, or PSD are all lossless formats - ie they keep all the information they're given. They try to compress it, but only in a "perfect" way: when you decompress you get exactly the same as what you started with. As a result they take up quite a lot of space on your hard drive and are not very suitable for the web.

GIF and JPG are not lossless. GIF reduces the number of colours to 256, so that each pixel (each dot in the picture) takes only one byte. Usually, lossless formats can take up to 3 bytes for each pixel. Also, having 1 byte per pixel allows to compress more easily when you have large areas of the same colour. Say you have a whole row of 100 pixels of the same colour, you won't need a 100 bytes for that, but just 2 bytes: one to give the colour, and one to tell it to repeat that 100 times.

JPEG is a bit more complicated, in that it approximates the picture in terms of "areas" or "bits" of one colour or another (actually each area can take on gradients as well!). The more you raise the compression, the smaller the bits are, the more detailed the resulting picture is. Still, jpeg tends to produce those "artifacts" around text, for instance (and other things), even at a fairly reasonable compression.

But that doesn't have anything to do with it being a photo. You can paint a line in a file and if you compress it too much, you'll see JPEG artifacts where the compression was not good enough...

Hope this helped!

Daniel

---

sorry to diss but technically there's a few flaws in this =)
BMP and TGA don't operate any compression at all, they are pure informations formats.
TIFF with LZW or the soontocome LZAB operates an awesome nondestructive compression (PSD's perlayer compression is based on the same algorythm).
also raising the JPG's compression enlarges the blocks doesn't shrink em (i think u just had a lapsus there though cuz you seem knowledgeable enuf to know that =).
Said that photos and paintings at middle to high rates of compression present a totally different kind of subtle artifacts, while u always get what's called DBP (don't ask me what it stands for though =) errors on very contrsted edges or lines (those weird effects that look like u passed the PS' sharpen once too much ) the different texture of film grain and of bursh storkes generate different problems , usually more evident in photos.
lately on www.planetphotoshop.com there's a decent tutorial on preediting of pics for web pubblication u could wnt to visit to learn a new trick or 2 (slight blurring to prevent edge artifacts etc.).

hope this made someone's idea clearer, correction are welcome =)

[micke]

Chapel, that was not the intention at all.
The meaning of using the sketch was that he was suppose to paint it, shade it realistic,
with correct shadows etc in colours..
None of the lines of the sketch should be present when it's done.

------------------
-Mikael Noguchi-

http://www.katode.org/noguchi/

[SushiMaster]

Frost: I knew that :-P Just didn't want to swamp the guy hehe... I could even copy out the description of the Lempel-Ziv-1977 alogorythm out of the O'Reilly "Mastering Algorythms with C" but I guess that would be a bit pointless :-P Glad you managed to program a LZW thingy... The furthest I got in compressing and decompressing stuff was PCX, which is just plain RLE... :-P Then again that was about 6 years ago... Damn, time passes quickly...

The_Jaco - I stand corrected (are you sure TGA never has any compression, though, even optional?). The lapsus was, in fact, a lapsus :-P

Daniel

[Chapel]

Micke: ahh... ok that makes sense. Lets hope he knows that. But if you really wanted to challenge him you should have told him to use one of my crappy sketches and make it look realistic. Hehe..

By the way your linework is done so well it still shouldn't be too hard to paint. I mean you pretty much layed everything out for him but colors.

[ThE_JacO]

TIFF's LZW is native and embedded in the refresh the TIFF got in 89 or 90 (that we all know to be a kinda "de facto standard" of the market).
TGA is an open format of irix derivation therefore there could be some non destructive compressions algorythm for it around but they aren't certain to be supported (like the old softimage 3.7 PIC2TGA conversion that gave serious troubles outta matador).

I'm pleased to see that the artist=technically ignorant thingy is prooved wrong again.

My respects for having acknowledged a correction, this forum has by far the most mature audience and users around the net.
I think that for a digital ART forum we used enuf achronymes (or howere its spelling is ;P) but if anybody is willing to correct me or share knowledge or ask something about anything discussed in the last posts of this thread i'd be happy to correspond with ppl from here at [email protected]

peace

[SushiMaster]

I wish I could count to bend the statistics, but I don't count myself (yet) in the "artist" category of this forum - I'll accept the title when I actually produce an original picture that's worth seeing... :-)

Gimme... say... two or three years of drawing heads on everything from toilet paper to exam papers and I'll get better :-P

Can't wait to see pierre's attempt!

Daniel

[nightmare]

umm
where is pierre anyway? busy painting? run away? i wonder what is really going on.

[black_fish]

You know what? This guy will never post here anymore.

He's gone to another forum, trying to pass himself as an artist.


What a poor life it is.

[Thomas Mandelid]

I`m totally new to the quality of work you guys are producing, so...

I think this guy is a fraud! But I hope he proves me wrong...

...I should also mention that some of his work (he claims) is regular oil painting on canvas. Once in the Nationalgallery in Oslo, Norway I tripped the alarm in an effort to decide if a painting was in fact a big photo. So this degree of realisme is by no means impossible. But in this case I think his bluff has been called....

ps : The oil painting I was talking about was called "Burial at Sea" or something like that....

[Plop]

In his own private little world he is a Da Vinci.

[FaithInChaos]

what if he isnt a fraud? you shouldnt make staments that have no merit behind them. i doubt anyone could churn a photorealistic image out of their ass in a matter of minutes. the guy might have a full time job at a sewage plant, and after a full day of sifting through shit and vommit...he might not have the energy to produce a masterfull digital creation. my point is...its only been a day or two, give it a rest.

if in a week or so if he has yet to uploaded even a work in progress, then i could see a reason for your bitching.

[Frost]

He appareently drew the lion in another thread in 30 minutes, and spent most of the evening yesterday talking and wanting to prove to us that he is in fact that good.
I hope he comes back and proves us all wrong, cause such a person would be a great help to those of us who want to learn how to do so well.
Anyway, we'll see...

[AliasMoze]

Without proof, I'd hate to point my finger and call you a fraud, Pierre. But the "car designs" page of "marker renderings" on your site make me chuckle.

And the "acrylic" painting of the castle-looking building makes me skeptical too. If it's a painting on canvas, why is the sky so blown out? And why does it look like a digital photo?

Not accusing, just asking.

[Mozeman]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, in no uncertain terms, this guy did not paint these pictures.

Take a look at the image from his site that n8 posted. Not only is it definately NOT acrylic, I'm willing to bet that the photo was taken either with a digital camera or is video still. The handling of the colors, the latitude, resolution, and the contrast all indicate some sort of digital origin rather than a traditional print photo. This is NOT a painting. It doesn't even look like he bothered to add a filter to this particular one, tho' they do seem to have been utilized for some of his other images.

This is not to say that photorealistic paintings are not possible, but this guy doesn't do them.

The last time someone came in here and tried this crap, he never came back after being busted. I wonder if Pierre will be the same.

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Mozeman
Moser Brothers Animation Forum