Jessie's Finals (nudity)

DEEP BLUE
In the deepest part of the blue there is a light. Something to remind you that the pressure that pushes against you can be over come. No matter how deep in the darkness you are,
no matter how much you want to give up and push that last bit of air from your lungs - You must find your light in the deep blue.

I didn't get to push this as far as I wanted and time is telling me I need to move onto a new piece but I wanted to take a minute and thank everyone that critiqued and comments over in the challenge thread.

Jesse - I think the coloured fish are a nice added element in your illustration, I can see on the forehead that you played with scales but perhaps some textures or some kind of detailing on the rest of the face to go with the aquatic theme would help it blend in more? At the moment there's a lot of detail and then there's a large blue area without anything, but all in all very nice

aonodori: Thanks, hun. I agree I didn't have the time to push this as far as I intended. I may come back to it and push the texture a little further.

Jessie: Lovely style as always; crisp, clean and striking. I do like watching your pictures develop in ways I just don't understand, ways that are so alien to my own scribbly, smeary mess. And this picture's another good one. Despite the hardness of line and solidity of colour that comes with vector work you've still managed to capture the softness of hair and the delicate ethereal forms of amorphous jellyfish, all encapsulated in the ominous pressure of the surrounding water, a pressure that emphasizes the melancholic mood- that internal state created and influenced by external stresses, stresses that the soft jellyfish seem oblivious to as you gaze at them almost in envy of their indifference to the oppressive force. There's a real sense that the picture is expressing something beyond what we can see in the image, it has a real emotional maturity and sophistication and if this was an open brief this may well have won it for me but the "fantasy self portrait" tag made me lean towards something less darker. In fact the more I talk about this picture the more I want to give it some points but voting rules won't let me. Damn them! No, I made my decision, slap me for it if you like, I certainly deserve it, but congratulations on a great painting!

Valance: Your words are something to admire. I could read your comments forever, over and over again. It amazed me how well you read the image, even better than I intended. Thanks for that and the lovely comments and don't worry I won't slap you.....very hard anyway.

Jessie- The strong mono chromatic color scheme could have overwhelmed the piece but is tempered by the addition of the accent color in the fish and the lovely lighting of the creatures and the bounced lighting on the face.

Hobby: You're so right. It could of overwhelmed the piece and I was overwhelmed by it for so long. I tried different colors for the jellyfish and nothing seemed to work as well and the aqua blue color.

Jessie - Was really hard not to vote for your because it's pretty awesome, the blue hue themed with the ocean life is a cool idea and you did it really well, love the jellyfish and other details, brush strokes are really smooth too, and the colors are great!

Micro: Thanks! You will see no brush strokes from me though. The only elements that is not a color filled vector shape is the overlaying texture, which is still added in my vector program.

SIDE NOTE:

Deep Blue really loses it's impact in a jpg format. It looks much better and true to the original as a TIFF which the website won't let me upload.

Have you tried as a PNG? That format usually retains more of the solid colours and gradients and may be more suitable to vector stuff (but watch out for the file size.)

But even as a jpeg it looks outstanding.

I did. It looks similar to the jpeg. The tiff file format looks the best to me. If you wanna check out my deviant art page and tell me if you can tell the difference, I would love you forever and always....well I will do that even if you don't check my deviant art page.

(comes back from deviantart)

Wow that looks even better! The jellyfish are much more vibrant both in terms of value and colour.

The one I've just downloaded from dA is a png not a tiff. It's weird how the jpeg looks different though. Have you tried saving the jpeg at different compression settings. Although I do know a nerdy little bit about Fourier transforms I don't quite understand why it would have that effect on the picture. Clearly I don't know enough!

Edit...
Replying to myself here... it's not the jpeg format because I've just converted it on my tablet and it still looks good. Wonder if it's the site...



Nope still looks good to me. It's a mystery!

Haha! Right? That's how it looks in my program! The file I uploaded to DA is in fact a tiff. I don't have a saved PNG file on my computer to upload.

So what is happening!!!??? Seriously? The image you posted looks way better and it's a jpeg!


-Now I want to edit my challenge post with the better jpeg you magically created.

I don't know much about TIFFs, they seem to be used by professionals and therefore not by me. But I know that depending on the compression their file sizes are sometimes as big as PSDs and so I expect that dA automatically converts them so that it doesn't slow down their website.

I didn't do anything special when converting it, just Save As in an Android photo editor, not even special software and certainly no colour adjustments.
A question for you (and sorry if you've explained this before.) When saving a jpeg do you export it directly from the vector software?
If so then I'd suggest exporting as TIFF then converting to jpeg in Photoshop (or something similar.)
If you're already doing that (and you probably are) then .... erm... you'll have to... um....
OK, I admit, I don't know what else to try. Will have to think harder.

Yes tiffs are a higher quality choice but larger.

Yes I export to jpg directly from my program so that is a great idea!

Banj wrote:

I would look into the colour management settings and proof settings of the application you are exporting from, along with the export settings. Check to see whether you are embedding a colour profile in one format and not the other which would result in a difference (that would also affect how it displays in some browsers compared to others).

I have. I have rechecked and triple checked everything - the profile setting and every other dialog box possible. The JPG exports as it's highest quality with the same settings as the TIFF. I did see that the TIFF window gives me the option to save it with a few options such as a uncompressed or with a JPG compression. When doing the jpg compress, the file went from 24.1MB to 8.5MB without losing any quality. But it's still a TIFF....So I don't know if I gained anything.