Focus

[John Reidy]

Steve,

Here is the painting I refered to concerning focus. My intention was to create depth and a focus point. I needed the depth to pull off the piece and the composition lent itself to a composition to force the eye to the action of the subject.

Here's the post from the unveiling section.

[Steven Sweeney]

[I have to preface the following by saying that when I opened your image up this morning on a different monitor using a better browser, the effect was markedly different from what I was looking at when I wrote the following and made the image adjustment. It may well be that in another day, my take on this would be different, but that "other day" will be in mid-June sometime, so I'll just post this for whatever use you may be able to make of it.]

Okay, John, as I wrote elsewhere, this is nicely executed, a thoughtful capturing of another artist at work, in his

[Steven Sweeney]

Yes, just dropping in for a moment to look with "fresh" eyes, I've gone a little too dark with the "non-focal" areas and, if nothing else, altered the mood of the piece. I'll see if I can't ease up on that and re-post the image, because I do think that the direction is right, it just went too far. It's hard to translate subtlety between differently calibrated monitors.

Meanwhile, anyone with Photoshop or other imaging software could capture this image and experiment with brightening the entire image or parts of it. The "focus" idea is to make the eye go to the focal area through some combination of intense or subdued color, strong or slight contrast, hard or soft edges, little or lots of detail.

All of which is NOT to say that everything outside the focal area will be bland and indistinct and unimportant. It's a matter of the elements in relation to each other, not "the important thing and then all the other stuff."

[John Reidy]

Steve,

Thanks for your generous response. I am grateful for your thoughts and especially the way you thread them together.

Per the topic of these discussions I am eager to learn the opportunities and the various ways that we as artists can manipulate our art to achieve these goals. I hope that we can all participate and I know that I have learned a lot already and am looking forward to learning more.

Please everyone, jump in.

[Allan Rahbek]

John,
There are many roads to Rome.
Another method to put the focus on a figure is to darken the shadow areas of the figure and keep the highlights brighter, so that it stands out from the more even values of the background.

I have only darkened the shadows a bit so that you will know the idea.

Allan

[Steven Sweeney]

Yes, that works, too, punching up the value design within the figure itself. Whatever it takes to distinguish it, and cause the eye's "needle" to swing toward that magnetic pole in the picture.

Not to beat this to death, but I raised the value a little on my earlier version and am curious to see how it will appear on the various monitors I see these things on over the course of the days.

[Steven Sweeney]

Some combination of those last two images, including Allan's deepening of the body shadows on the figure, is probably getting about optimum.

It probably seems to some like we're "having our way" with John's painting, trying to insist on a single course. In fact we're just making some rather gross adjustments to try to illustrate a few ideas about how the focal area can be given its rightful prominence in the overall presentation. As Allan suggested, there are many ways to accomplish this -- but it's useful to do so, by whatever means you choose.