Star - a digital project

[GeePig]

Have you ever wanted to get involved in something, but never had the opportunity or the inclination to make the sacrifices required in terms of cash or storage space for all those goodies and tools that seem to be needed? That's the situation I found myself in, and the computer editing of digital images seemed the ideal situation. After all, I already had my tool - my computer.

 

I was once trained as a mechanic, and then as a development engineer, so the skills and knowledge to work on real vehicles was not a problem. Arthritis and a small flat in Poland made things mechanical more problematic, but wishing to spend time in the presence of my wife rather than an obstinate pile of metal sealed the direction I should take. Poland was an advantage, back in the days when little information was available about transport here I had a large website with hundreds of scanned in photos, each small in size due to the slowness of the net in those early days.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is 40kB worth of 300 pixel wide Star image from my website back in 1998, something I can work with, a challenge. I don't edit images as many do, with all the tools available on Photoshop, I sue the free Gimp photo editor, and only the most basic of tools there. From a standard size digital photo it usually takes me about a week of evenings and a weekend to get the kind of result I like, but this is tiny.

 

This will not be a guide to the best way to edit photos, nor how to produce fine realistic images, nor restoring damaged pictures of Aunty Flo. It's about a challenge.

 

Stage one was to blow the image up to 3000 pixels wide, something big enough to play around with. The original jpg file had some compression on it, and now that can be seen clearly.

 

 

 

 

 

The next stage will be to smudge the colours and details with a pen. But not tonight, it's getting late and I have to work in the morning.

[GeePig]

Well, I have completed the next, and relatively quick stage of hacking the main part of the image and adjusting the colours. Basically, I use a smudge tool set to 100% to smear all the colours to destroy the original - this allows me to get rid of any details I do not want and to start making blurred details that I do want to look clearer.

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, it is brighter, but messy. This took me about 40 minutes to do, and already the effects of the jpeg compression on the small original fil have disappeared and it has lost the faded look that my old scanner used to give to all my photos.

 

One of the things that interests me is the removal of things like wheelnuts, because what I am trying to create is an impression of the lorry, not a replica. Other stuff which will disappear include the two cars in the background, and what will remain is my impression of what the lorry meant to me. This is not far different to the restoration process for a real vehicle - we happily remove fittings, rust, paint and whatever else appears on a vehicle later on in its life to show how we want it to be seen. We may even paint it in a colour and with regimental insignia that it never had in life, because at the end of the day we often want the vehicle we see in our mind rather than the real life of the vehicle we possess. For older and rarer vehicles we may even have to manufacture our own parts to complete the vehicle, meaning the result is even less 'real'.

 

In fact, the more ruined the vehicle is, the more we have to do to it, and the less we can be concerned about the originality. The same is true here, the poorer the photo, the less I concerned I can be with maintaining the details. It's a kind of freedom.

[Essex5]

Fascinating - I love the way the 'smudging' makes it look like an oil painting.

 

Another interesting way to be involved with military vehicles, without the grime of 1:1 or the disappointment (well, to me anyway) of models.

 

Look forward to seeing some more.

 

John

[GeePig]

It does, John, and it was an effect that I did consider following up.

 

I didn't get on well with models, so hard to know what to do with them when you have more than enough to display - people think you are odd when you choose to shoot them with an air rifle. Suggesting that it is a re-enactment is so unconvincing...

 

As an aside, I thought I should add a bit of background on this vehicle and its location.

 

Star is short for Starachowice ('Old Chowice'), the town in Poland where they were made, the company being FSC "Star" (including speech marks), literally 'Factory Vehicle Commercial "STAR", to use Polish word order. The truck is a Star 660, which were made from the early 60s to early 80s. I am not sure if this one was still on active service when I snapped it in the late 90s or privately owned as most seemed to have been painted plain dark green by that stage. Note that the cab roof is removable, and yes the cab does indeed have canvas sides, such a lovely choice for the climate, and I don't remember seeing much in the way of rollover protection.

 

In the background is a typical Communist era factory / warehouse type building, in standard yellowy-cream, built to crumble disgracefully, of cheap materials so that the money saved could be invested where it could have the greatest effect, in the party member's pockets. This archtectural style is as ubiquitous in Poland as the bay-fronted mock Tudor style is in the great inter-war surburban estates of Britain.

 

Here in Lublin, where I think I took this shot, there were three very large military bases until about a decade ago, while National Servoce still existed. One, dating back at least to the days of the Austrian occupation of this part of Poland, has gone; another, opposite the Majdanek Concentration Camp and possibly German in origin, has probably all shut down now, while for the third, also at least Austrian in date, only fragments remain. Interesting, for me, is that if I look out of my window at work, across the road are the former buildings of a Polish armoured regiment, the worksops of which are today painted in a rather fetching shade of green.

[GeePig]

I had a week away from doing any work on my computer, but I have since reworked the truck part of the image, sharpening up the details and getting rid of any of the odd bits of colour one gets from the colour adjustment process. I also started sharpening up the detail that I do want to keep.

 

Compare this with the original image!

 

When you are zoomed into 400% to edit you don't see much of the vehicle, and you are not always sure what part you are working on. However, I let myself be guided by the lines and colour I can see and for the most part I get the right result. when I was a development engineer I learned that it is best not to listen to much to tradition and craft, because they deal with the past, what is already known. In development you are dealing with things that no one else has ever done before. There are no manuals. Or people to give you the answers. The answer is to look closely at what you have and try and figure out what it is telling you. So I don't worry what I am working on, I can always zoom out and fix any inconsistencies later. There are some things that do need fixing, but it is a much quicker way of working than continually zooming in and out.

 

 

 

 

 

The hardest things to get right are the headlights and the tyre treads. It takes a lot of fiddling to get the lights to look right, as they stand out much more than any other detail. The tyre treads have to look continuous around each tyre and the same on all tyres - and since the original image doesn't have much detail I have to invent it. They look better before I started detailing, but there is a long way to go yet.

 

One difficulty with this shot is that the truck is on a slight slope. The editing program has vertical and horizontal guides you can position very easily, and you can use these to help get sharp, straight edges. Except with a 5 degree list I will have to either do all the straight edges by eye or use a more cumbersome method.

 

Talking of edges, I now have a sharpish edge around the truck, one I can use to cut the truck out of the background. This will make editing the truck a bit easier - but editing the background a WHOLE lot easier.

[Enigma]

That painted look is great!

[GeePig]

Thanks, it's been a long road to arrive at the simple technique required

[GeePig]

At first glance, nothing much seems to have changed, but I have been working on the background instead of the truck itself.

 

 

 

 

 

If you have never really used a photo editing program, then you might not have heard of layers. One of the tricky things to edit is where something nearer the camera partly obscures something further away, to get a neat join where they meet. If you have something like a jpeg or gif image file then there is only one layer, rather like a photo print. An editing program can save a whole stack of images, each of which is called a layer. Imagine you had 2 identical photos, and placed them one on top of the other. You would not see the one behind because the one in front obscures it completely. Now, imagine that you cut the background off the front image and put it back on top of the other - now you would see the truck of the front image, and the background of the rear image. And that is what you can see here. Now I don't have to end the window frame where it meets the truck, I can continue it a bit further, and when editing the truck I don't have to worry about accidentally clipping the background.

 

Anyway, I have tidied away the cars that used to be parked beside the building by painting over them using colours from elsewhere on the building or ground, and I have sharpened up the windows and given the walls a rub over. The only thing I am still not sure about is whether to keep the sandy yellow piece of foreground.

[Rick W]

I like that, very good, I've just discovered Coloursplash on the ipad, you can turn a colour photo to black and white and then choose parts to highlight in the original colour.

[GeePig]

Yes, there are some nice little tools around these days to do interesting things to photos - a whole lot easier than in the days of film!

[GeePig]

This weekend I was mainly working on another image - and sorting out helping wifie exchange her winter and summer shoes in the closet, not a small task by any stretch of the imagination.

 

I sharpened up the truck layer, getting nice edges between areas of colour. At the same time I sorted out some errors like the fact there is a window on the rear of the cab visible behind the windscreen wiper that should be rectangular and visible.

 

Because there are dark areas on the image, I have a white layer visible on top of the other layers, set at 20% visible, as this makes what is happening in the dark areas much easier to see. You can see this in the picture below.

 

 

 

 

 

One area I have barely touched is the truck's grille, made up of a lot of vertical bars and slots. At the moment the image is 3000 pixels wide, which is a good size to get most of the details mostly right. Eventually the image will be expanded until it is 6000 pixels wide, after which much of the image will need resharpening to get nice clean joins between colour areas. I did not go straight to 6000 pixel wide as it is quicker to resharpen after expanding from 3000 pixels than do all the edits at 6000 pixels. After all, the 6000 pixel wide image is four times the area of the 3000 pixel wide level.

 

Anyway, for the grill it is different, it is lots and lots of parallel edges that are close together. I will do all the fine edits after expanding the image to its final size. Knowing this kind of thing can shave days or weeks of an edit job.

[GeePig]

I had hoped to make a bit of progress over the long may day weekend, but wifies sadly introduced a virus to the computer and it had to be carted away. Well, the virus could have been fixed in place, but the computer was filled to the gills with 5 years worth of dust, meaning maintenance was well overdue and welcome. So I didn't get anything done.

 

I had had the image file open when the virus stepped in, and I was a bit worried I might have lost it, but everything was OK as I had save the file just before letting wifie play.

 

I have resized the image to 6000 pixels wide, nearly 10 times the original image width, and have got stuck into the onerous task of doing the final resharpening to the whole image, all done by hand.

[okdoky]

Hi Gee

 

I have a few reference books of military vehicles and uniforms where the colour plates have clearly been taken from photographs and reference colours added giving the images that painted look !!!!!!

 

Would be worthwhile compiling a reference library of your final images that could make a good book with tech info on the vehicles !!

 

Nice work

 

Nige

[GeePig]

Thanks Nige!

 

I need to collect more images to work from, I can see I will have to 'force' myself to visit a museum I have heard of in Warsaw...

 

Trevor

[GeePig]

Well, after some delays due to other commitments, I am really close to finishing. At 6000 pixels wide, it takes hours to edit the lines and colours to make a really sharp image. I have finished the truck itself and done the right had side of the background.

 

 

 

 

 

I left doing the grille of the truck until near the end, because the individual uprights are thin and difficult to edit - they all have to end up parallel and equal width. By waiting until I expanded the image to 6000 pixels wide I had the best chance of doing a good job.

 

I am quite pleased with the progress, but I have already started work on the next image - plus another couple I am doing on other subjects. With all this good weather, it is hard to find the time to sit down and have a good session.

[GeePig]

Well, I have finally finished it! I am quite pleased, as I enjoy both the challenge and the subject matter, a pleasant change from the people and buildings I usually do.

 

To give some idea of what I have achieved, if you look carefully in the top left hand corner of the image below you will see the original image I created this from, on a one-to-one scale.

 

 

 

 

 

To get the image to fit on this page, I scaled it down from 6000 pixels wide to 1000 pixels. Below is a fragment of the actual size. It is large enough to print out at about 40-50 inches wide!

 

 

 

 

 

You can see my interest in abstracts better at the larger size. This means that instead of dissolving to a blur as a normal image does when you get up close, you end up with blocks of colour.

 

Well, now that this one is done, I have another in the pipeline. This one will have a larger original, so it should be quicker to do. I might also replace the original background with plain white, which will be a great saving in effort.

 

Trevor

[Nik]

Most interesting and excellent result. I use Painter which has clone brushes which I have used on portrait photos but never thought to use them on vehicles. Think I might have a go.

Thanks for the article.

 

cheers Nik

[GeePig]

Hi Nik, I considered Painter a few years ago, but chose to use Gimp instead and I suppose I have become comfortable with it. I use exactly the same techniques for all my images, including portraits and cityscapes, and a change of subject I find always refreshing. So, go for it!

 

trevor