Photo realistic look ? What's that all about actually ?

I've always been amazed by those artists who paint so magnificently on computers, tadaaam here's a painting with photo-realistic look x_x ...

You can see them almost everywhere on the web, though there aren't so many but still, some of them use some 3D programs to get the work done...

Well I've tried to figure out how would they pick their colors, values, and other things ..

First I saw that a lot of them use references ... so they just had to pick the color on a picture with the good value and the good saturation and it' s done, others pick colors from pictures to build some color palettes and they train themselves to get used to it...

Painting with colors is good I won't deny it, doing this is quite hard but still I've never done something good with it...

You certainly already saw Chris Scalf, Nico Di Mattia paintings and other guys, well sure sometimes they explain how they made it out but that's totally not enough :/

Proof is I still can't do it myself O_O

------------ So I tried something else -----------------

I've search some references too on the internet, I've found a lot of things, cars, humans, animals, houses, blablabla ... and I've tried to get use to how the colors, values and saturation evolve and in which situation bla bla bla again ...

But it was too difficult to remember everything x_x
So then I tried to only study the values as a lot of artists rely on the values to get their big job done...

So here I opened my picture, desaturated it, and try to understand how values should evolve... I've done this study from time to time in 5 months, it helped a lot too but this was still wrong...




Why should I think that values are wrong ? Because when I tried to colored a desaturated picture it won't get the same way again but how did I color it then ?

Well, a lot of artists put their colors in multiply and then put some light and shadow effect on it to cover the strong colors but that's quite hard to do :/
What I did like for a long time was to put my colors in Overlay, the overlay mode keep most of the values safe but it changes them a bit and colors them too...

But it was still wrong, 'cause either my picture was too saturated or it was not saturated enough, and the colors are never right I have to change them always to get something good ...

You see, when you desaturated a colored picture, it loses some values that colors had bring into it...




So I try something I've already did before but this time with more attention :
I picked a reference, a colored picture, I opened it with Gimp, create a new white layer in first line and I duplicated the picture twice, one layer of the picture would be in Value mode and the others would be in Saturation and Hue mode

You could see that putting a colored picture in Luminosity mode won't make you lose the true values, obvious ? of course that is ! but we're all desperate out there :/

So Obviously speaking, the Saturation mode would keep the Saturation of the colored picture and the Hue mode would keep the Hue of the colored picture, still obvious...




Now now, did you see how human skin react with light ? It's quite nice huh ? well in some pictures I've check I saw something like this ( not always though but that's a good way to start )





you could see that when a pixel has a value of X, it would have a saturation of Y
so that X + Y = 100 ( approximately )

That's not true for every pictures and every type of skins, sometimes X + Y = 130~135 or 120~130 but I only saw that things on HD pictures

As for vehicles you would be surprised to see how much saturation make the great work here






What's the hue thing for then ? well you could just laugh at colors cause it got 360 possibilities where humans' eyes can clearly see just 17 of them :D

So now you think that all you have to do is to put the good saturation on the good pixel which has got the good value ? Nah I tried that too, the result is good, I promise you sometimes it's surprising but we could do something else which could help us all much faster ...

( First of all we must get good values then good saturation, with these two we would have a good picture xD )

What about a script which change all values pixels in saturation ones according to our equations ? I think that if I had this, things would be tooooo much easy

Anyway I'll try to get something like this later, if you're interest in it, let me know =)