[jfrancis]

I have a photo composite I'm not completely happy with. I shot the photo and rendered a Maxwell background. It may seem as if I blurred the skin to retouch it. I actually did not blur it at all. (I never do that) but I blew the focus a little when I shot it.

Anyhow...

I'm looking for ideas on how to age the photo. Not looking for a simple Photoshop recipe, though. I want to create something solid. Some kind of fake 'artifact' using Maxwell.

I thought of:

Cracking photo with paper showing through.

Some sort of glass plate containing the image.

Polaroid, I guess. Although I've seen that a lot. Would model it and use Maxwell, though.

Printed on some kind of paper where the darker ink is shinier than the paper.

Embossed, letterpress paper with gold foil, like a print from an old photo studio from the early 1900's.

Paper corners to hold the photo into an 'album.'

Antique silver photo corners, tarnished and ornate (using Maxwell)

Some sort of metal plate?

------------------

I actually don't know that much about early photochemical photographs, but I want to mimic the look of one.

Any suggestions?

[ivox3]

I don't know if this is kind of a cheat.

The idea is to 'beat down' the other things, frame, glass, etc.. and maybe model the image with a crack(certainly easier said than done). ...but definitely model the glass crack.

This is a render that Sandy did that I kind of always remembered, because it had this awesome dirty glass. @Sandy ...
Steal one of those and use it in the frame ..


I also found this image ... In my mind I thought there was an antiquated technique for back-painting a photograph on glass (which would be excellent for Maxwell) ... Anyway, ... don't know if that was a real thing or not, ...but I found this image.

Might help your further some ideas... You know, .. with the way they used to color certain parts of the image and leave some parts in B/W. A thought..

[jfrancis]

good ideas. thank you.

I wonder if I could find some dirty glass somewhere. I can totally throw some dirt together in photoshop and use it as a mask between glass and dirty glass materials, but I'm trying to think if there is some rectangular object that already has texture on it.

I have some black scratchboard. If you scratch it it reveals white underneath. Maybe I could sand or distress the black off the edges and scan it.

I also have these crackle plaster textures I made. I just used one as a mask between a cobalt blue material and metal gold (gold in the veins between the blue pieces), and it looked pretty interesting. Maybe I could use it to distress the image itself in some way. Not sure if crackling like dried mud is realistic behavior for a photo, but it might look interesting.

I like the idea of the modeled glass crack. And of course the frame itself is pretty cool. It would take some patience to capture the details in that frame in Maxwell.

[jfrancis]

Technicolor 2-strip process.

Some sort of misregistration between color seps.

A crease or two in the paper from a fold.

[ivox3]

yeah .. they tend to crack in a linear way, but you could still apply it to a few sq.inches in a corner and then do a fade with it.

Following along with another thought ... Lately I've been messing around a lot with different software used for color grading DV footage -- and I'll pretty much mess with just about any pic I see. lol. One of those tools is the cheap Motiva RealCam.
So just for the hell of it .. I ran it though, .. don't ask me what settings I used, .. I just started throwing sliders til I thought it had a nice pre-digital look.

Hope you don't mind ... It is a great image. You might not have blurred the skin, ... but I did.

[jfrancis]

Interesting. The green/magenta misregistration that you did on her thigh was something I was thinking about as well.

I wish I knew more about this wet plate / collodion / ambrotype stuff to understand exactly what I was looking at in these funky edges here

http://www.flickr.com/groups/wetplate/pool/

I could simulate a color version of the process that never actually existed - combining 3 black and white plates like in these old Russian photos

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

[ivox3]

Yep .. Motiva has a slider for lens abberation(chromatic) that makes that kind of thing easy.


Those black and whites are very cool ... I too would love to know more about the process -- how sweet would that be to process video with !?
I must learn ... lol..

[ivox3]

Lots of stuff on YTube ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K_xQ0MDzlU

[ivox3]

This info came from the a YTube video on Daguerrotypes ...

The Daguerreotype Photographic process is grainless and extremely sharp. One of the first and still the best photographic processes ever invented.

The fact that they are rendered on polished silver, must be tilted to be viewed and exhibit an almost 3D depth to them means that the Daguerreotype look cannot be simulated electronically in Photoshop, etc. Indeed, each Daguerreotype is a unique object not merely an image. A jewel to be held and admired.

But he didn't say Maxwell !! ... I feel challenged.

Totally eerie ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmiDh0rLc9A

[jfrancis]

Lots of stuff on YTube ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K_xQ0MDzlU

That was cool.

[jfrancis]

This info came from the a YTube video on Daguerrotypes ...

The Daguerreotype Photographic process is grainless and extremely sharp. One of the first and still the best photographic processes ever invented.

The fact that they are rendered on polished silver, must be tilted to be viewed and exhibit an almost 3D depth to them means that the Daguerreotype look cannot be simulated electronically in Photoshop, etc. Indeed, each Daguerreotype is a unique object not merely an image. A jewel to be held and admired.

But he didn't say Maxwell !! ... I feel challenged.

Totally eerie ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmiDh0rLc9A

I saw some art pieces consisting of transparencies over metal - brass, I think, that were interesting. I thought I could simulate them in maxwell.

The transparency was shiny when clear. A little rougher / duller over the black part, and the clear part was a window to a sheet of slightly anisotropic metal sitting immediately behind.

[sandykoufax]

I don't know this is helpful to you, but I did these mask maps for the dirty windows.



This is one of them.


ps) Thanks, ivox3.

[jfrancis]

Those are very nice, and they worked well, too. Thanks for showing them.

[sandykoufax]

Those are very nice, and they worked well, too. Thanks for showing them.

really? there is no problem with window scale and ratio?

If you wanna other maps for them, I can upload others.

[jfrancis]

I meant they worked out well in your piece. I didn't try them.

I'm still weighing ideas on what style of photo to emulate.