The Crestock Photoshop Contest 2007

HERE : http://www.sideshowsito.com/xiolita_hi_res.jpg --- ^_^

Nice job =o), this same idea was in my mind, but I did'n use that.

Very nice work, I like your composition

Dang. Lots of thought went into this. Excellent idea...even better execution.

Alright, as promised, here are some tidbits about the piece I created called " Xiolita " ( pronounced Zoe-E-lee-tuh ) .
Approximate completion time ( 2 days ) approximately 16-20 hours combined

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FENCE ( Photographed by Me ) - Shot this fence earlier on this year for another shoot. I knew it would come in handy one day ^_^
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/fence.jpg

MODEL ( Photographed by Me ) - Straight forward shot to be composited into dress/gown.
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/ats.jpg

DRESS ( Photographed by Me ) - After deciding the theme for the image, i went to the goodwill and found an elegant dress ( kids size only ) that i used for the shoot. It was only $3.50
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/dress.jpg

TARGET ( created in Photoshop CS3 ) - Just simple circles layered to create the illusion ( with layer mode adjustments later applied )
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/target.jpg

POSTER ( created in Illustrator CS2 ) - this, believe it or not took longer to make than the actual composite of the dart board/fence concept !!! ( illustrator CS2 kept crashing on me! )
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/poster.jpg

...... and of course the 2 crestock images provided that i used :

KNIFE ( original crestock image ) - Manipulated to create 3 dimensional look + highlights
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/knife.jpg

PRINCESS ( original crestock image ) - Corset used bust adjusdments made.
http://www.sideshowsito.com/how/princess.jpg

-- Ta dah !!! ....

Hope you guys enjoy my concept for " Xiolita " . Please feel free to leave any questions you may have . thanks for visiting ...

My favorite thus far! Very good with the knives, man.

How did you get the dirty effect on the wood? Is that a filter??

....with the help of a wacom tablet and 1000 different brushes , burning and dodging here and there in PS does the trick =) .. no filters applied to the fence.

... oh and btw .. theres tiny hint of 'add noise' in the pic ( as per filters are concerned ) but thats it ... nothing grand as to special effects stuff .. all done by hand ( well pen )

Yes, it is very well done (probably overdone) but using two minor pieces of the stock images in very minor roles does not fit the spirit of using one or more images as a central theme of your composition.

You just won yourself a Macbook Pro in my opinion. Excellent job. You have set the bar much higher in this round of the competition. I hope to see you in round 4 :P

Well true enough however i did use the 2 images still and theyre clearly visible . Unless Crestock has a huge problem with it .. then i guess its my loss . oh well =)

LOL .. well see about that ... lotsa talented competition out there and ill be happy regardless if i win anything or not .. i really enjoyed working on this peice and am proud to keep it as part of my new portfolio .. however this would make a realy kewl birthday present when the contest is finished ;p... gosh im getting old >

Yeah, this contest has been a blast so far. Good to see its not about winning for you. There are plenty of talented people surfacing in latter rounds of the contest for sure. Good luck with the judges!

that looks great...good work

Very nice. If I didn't have my own I'd probably vote for this simply out of sheer beauty. You're totally right about this not really mattering whether it's win or lose. I'm also just happy to have something to toss in my portfolio. This contest has given me a little bit of juice that I needed. The voting system can fly a kite. Being happy with myself for what I did is enough.

My own (shameless plug):
https://www.crestock.com/blog/design/contest2007/entry.aspx?id=5737

Good luck with everything!

don't let anyone know, but I really like this one.

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children.

"And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

this piece is beautiful.

still awesome piece though, but I think the use of the stock could be a more central feature

I'm not surprised at the amount of votes so far. Its an excellent piece, the first to be so well done. That alone speaks for why so many votes have been given in the amount of time it has been up.

Looks like she had all of these cool stuff! I guess you got a good camera? lightings and etc? My old little digital camera's outdated, and not even use it in this round, and it even took me three miserable hours to do mine with three stock pictures.... where is other knife or is it over?

i think this looks awesome!

however, it really doesn't make great use of the source images

am i wrong?

You could have shown some real photoshop skills and actually done something with the stock images rather than overproduce a photo shoot and then rig the votes. Sadly the fake votes on this one are going to keep inflating it. I wish it would just get totally deleted rather than having the votes trimmed over and over, which it's going to end up being.

I like your idea and it's well executed! (Except for the plants, they look rather flat somehow, although it's in your original photograph. I guess the lighting is off). But I agree with Layers. Too bad you avoided the challenge of combining and working with the stock images, and gave them minor roles instead.

as quoted above ............ " Very nice. If I didn't have my own I'd probably vote for this simply out of sheer beauty." .... lets see what you got hun ... !!!!!!! Cant wait for your reply !!!

Cmon out !! Hiding behind guest aliases is soooo low budget man !! ... BE A GROWN UP AND USE YOUR REAL CRESTOCK IDENTITY and dont forget to include your ROUND 3 Submition to justify how crappy i really am to everyone !!! =)

!! LOL Love tha quote lol ....Actually let them rant as much as they want !! - it really doesnt matter to me anyway ... it just shows the level of cowardly, unprofessional behaviour from people who enter these types of competitions. Typical 'noob' types really .. specially the ones online.

firstly, id like to say well done mate on a nice piece of work, the percentage of the composition that includes the stock images is a tad debateable, but that aint for me to say, its for the judges. I just wanna say that mayby all this posting here and in the main blog is doing you harm also, I have been refreshing the main page every 10 minutes or so and this has jumped 30 odd votes in a single refresh. Someone has got it in for you mate, which is a shame coz youve got skills. Even if it is being rigged, and crestock can filter out multiple IP's this vote rigging has taken the shine of the whole contest. Wish you all the luck mate and hope that crestock does the right thing next year.

I think your work is fantastic. Tell all those "design" wannabe's to start pointing fingers and saying things aren't fair once their "work" has even 1 vote!

holy moly what is going on here? leave this designer alone, please. some of you have said it....Crestock can and will sort this out if there is anything to sort out. If you don't like the piece, don't vote, or leave constructive criticism, which i applaud many of you for doing. i've watched several high vote entries go from 75 to 25 votes, so there doesn't seem to be TOO much to worry about as far as CS keeping things straight.

i do, however, think people are so passionate about this thing because of how round 4 ended up last year, and the outcry from all of us when the winner was named. the award was reversed in the end, but i feel many of us came back this year with a microscope...in some cases, having lost sight of the bigger picture.

the goal, in my opinion, is for CS to generate exposure, as well as develop a community within its servers, as well as reward some of us for helping to generate that exposure...on and on...and we all walk away with a piece of "art" to call our own (less copyright, but you know what i mean).

do i think the votes are high here? yes. but now it is Dr. Seuss' star bellied creatures, all of us running into and out of the machine to the point where the voting, and comments, have lost all meaning for this piece. and we're all just standing around staring at each other, some with stars on our bellies, some not.

let CS handle it. let the designer be. they submittted their work within the context of the rules, and whether or not voting is askew in our minds, so be it. i truly believe CS has enough going on upstairs to deal with this, again, if there is anything to deal with.

and the point about this piece is this. it is good. it is clean. great concept, rich. whether or not the designer could have done X or Y differently is very much worth discussion, and is the type of discussion each designer can grow from moving forward.

put it this way. an NFL star (Sean Taylor) was shot and killed in his own home a couple of weeks back. the media jumped all over it and suggested it was because he was young at one time and got into trouble, and the shooting was somehow linked, as if it were payback for continued wrongdoing. weeks later, the police discovered a burglary gone very wrong. the victim was innocent of being involved in shady goings on, and everyone should be eating their words now.

not to suggest that this designer ever did anything wrong as young person....point being, let's not jump to any conclusions about any designer here.

for my round 2 entry, someone suggested a later submission directly lifted my theme, and execution of that theme. i did get a little hot under the collar upon viewing it, but i soon realized it could be coincidence, and that the judges could look at things like submit date, the fact that the later submission hade 70 or so votes very early, and what appeared to be a ton of anonymous comments from friends.

shutting up, finally, let's just enjoy the submissions for what they are, vote or don't, leave some feedback, and leave the vote counting to CS.

Must be nice to have models and green screen set to work from, not much a chance for new artists to compete against a professional studio.

Next time, I think Crestock should hide the number of votes each piece gets until the results are revealed. I think this would change the competition a great deal, and no one would know or complain about people cheating the system. CS would find out either way... just my opinion...

it deserves this much vote i think :) great job !!

I like it! I like the colors and the shading. Only the plants - I agree with someone who wrote that they look a bit too flat.
You've got my vote. (damn :) it means I'm loser :))

ts great,the best ive seen, but i think is a Photoshop contest..

- i think the grass/hay should have been darker
- it would be also nice to put a shade element on the woman like u did on the fence: that blue'ish from the moon,
- so it would look more night'isher, you would have created a better atmosphere, same thing with the brown grass/hay
- the plants arent perfectionized =p in my opionon

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+ i love the fence, amazing shading and details
+ the knifes are amazing too, love their compositions, and details especially when they hit the fence, i love the smoothness really makes me horny =p

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conclusion: there are more contra's than pro's in my point of view so you wont get my vote. but i really like you style though. i could be also wrong with the contra's, maybe you it was your intention to make it that way. but i just like to give my point of view so no offense please

keep the good working, looking forward for your site

As some of you will know, this entry was subjected to vote-spamming earlier in the contest. The manner in which this was conducted, combined with the information we have gathered has made us conclude that there is no evidence that the contributor of this image had any involvement or prior knowledge of this activity.

The votes that were found not to be genuine user-generated votes have been removed, as well as all user accounts involved in this activity. Additionally we have removed the comments discussing voting for this image in particular, as they did not represent what we now know was going on fairly and correctly.

The Crestock Team

Wow...congrats on the win as I am sure with all the hype this is getting you won yourself the contest!

cool image but lack of shadows kind of diminishes the realism for me :/

Give him a break as he used the Knife and the Corset...
I think with what he has invested with the model and
dress shots in front of a green screen and time to get
them right to fit the desire design takes tallent. Besides
if he wins it will be a great Birthday Present indeed.

I for one hopes he wins and their is no rules saying friends
can't vote for him. As for Crestock, lay off them as they
are only doing what they can with the limit of what they
know about IP investigations. They are not the police or
FBI and know little to nothing to tell who friends are and who
are other designers on here period.

Great image and good luck my friend, you deserve it!

wow, you put a lot of work into this one! awesome!

lol "time in front of a green screen" do you know anything about photoshop? you can extract anything, you dont need a green screen to be able to extract an image from its background in photoshop....

Good stuff, my only 1 gripe: you have to be a very strong person to be able to get the knifes to penetrate the wood fence to such an extent... quite possibly it would be impossible given the low weight of the knifes. In addition the pinned dress suggests that the knife was thrown in an under hand sweeping motion (no other way to pick that dress up) so the force would have to be extremely high. The only reason i am bringing this up is because i love this work and i am just giving pointers for the future - you went this far to make it so stunning, go the extra step next time and take care of the details. Great job and i hope you win this content.

Folks... almost forgot to add , a small tidbit i forgot to include about the image regarding the principle photography:

I have x1 elinchrom 600 Style S self contained strobe that i used to light the props/model and a reflector to balance the light ratio and not have harsh shadows. I used is a Nikon D100 camera with a manual focus 1.8/50mm lens to capture the shot. ( shot at F11@ ISO 200 )

The green screen background setup was set up temporarily in my living room as a way of shooting the concept without having to spend any money on renting a studio ( i unfortunately do not own my own studiospace, hopefully someday ! ) . The material is made of seamless paper purchased at a camera store a year ago measuring 10Ft wide.

thanks for your time ,

^_^ SSS

@ ydemidov - maybe the fence is made of rotton balsa-wood lol

I am really amazed it's a nice picture, but I wouldn't be as awed if you hadn't included all the source photography you created to finish off this piece, so thanks for that.

Personally I like the fact that it looks nearly real, but still outlandish.

Good luck.

I love this piece. I have something in the contest, and I still voted for this one. Great Job.

Congratulations!

Amazing work! I'm inspired to try to learn photoshop better and blow the dust of the camera gear! :)

Lovely work and a really original idea. I wish I had that kind of talent. Curious about one thing though. Maybe the artist could explain. There is a leaf (or leaves) that are very red. Even with the hi-res image I couldn't make out if that's just supposed be a fall color for the leaf or if there's a nail and/or blood from an unknown source. Certainly the young lady in the picture doesn't seem harmed. A touch of mystery to an already intriguing scene? Or am I just "seeing" too much in the image?

Sideshowsito awesome work. How do I get in touch with you? I am new to this site, but I checked your profile and don't see an email address or anything.

This really is breathtaking work. Amazing composition! Thanks for posting the high-res. You're my new desktop wallpaper and will be for a while. Cheers!

great piece! :D

sideshowsito,

I'm launching a magazine in Canada next year. I'd like to get in touch with you about possibly outsourcing some work to you.

please contact me:
mario.zelaya@havenmagazine.ca

Regards,

-M

I love this!! Very good Job!!

Hola me parece increible tu trabajo, es muy bueno ....Saludos desde Mexico