Processing Challenge: Making a real picture look less fake

Processing
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The idea of this picture is burning a witch at the stake, but instead of burning lumber, she is being executed by a pile of burning books.

I’m using RT and Gimp on this image. I got the picture most of the way there in RT. But I wanted the books at the bottom of the frame to be a little brighter, so that you can tell they are books.

So I put the picture into GIMP, duplicated the layer, brightened it, and masked it so that only the books were brightened.

The problem is that the result I have looks fake. It looks to me like a bad composite where I cut and pasted a stack of burning books in front of the model.

Any suggestions on techniques to use to make it look more realistic?

The way I took the picture was I had the model standing about 6 feet (2 meters) away from the books. I used a telephoto lens to compress the distance. There is a softbox with a ½CTO gel at her feet to light her. The fire is real, but was not enough light to light her, and the light on the books and background was ambient light from the sky. I had a speedlight behind her to light the hair and rim light her.

Here is the best I can do with RT:

RT%20Result
RT%20Result822×1080 139 KB

Here it is after I brightened it and masked off everything but the books:

shadow%20slider
shadow%20slider822×1080 145 KB

I am experimenting with ways to make the colors more realistic, and seeking pointers on techniques to try and make it look more realistic.

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  • The light on the model does not look like light from a fire, and it is too bright compared to the light given off by the burning books.
  • The flash is directly visible through her hair - move it down.
  • Currently the flames are centered in the image, and barely visible against the white dress. Maybe it would work better if they were on both sides instead, against the black background.
  • Use a smaller aperture to keep both model + books in focus, and stand further away and zoom in more to reduce depth perception, Depth of Field (DoF) calculator | PhotoPills
1 Like
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Two ways I make localized portions of an image brighter in RT are with the graduated filter with a vignette. I do this by darkening everything else in the image and then globally adjusting brightness or exposure compensation.

So for this image, I would darken everything above the books with the graduated filter. You can also use some negative vignette correction centered on the flame.

The vignette correction in the lens geometry section allows you to change the x & y coordinates. First max everything out so so the image is almost black and the radius of the vignette is the smallest possible. You can then see exactly where the center point is. Use the x and y sliders to place it over the flames and then back the other sliders down to a more moderate level.

Finally, raise the exposure compensation and / or brightness of the entire image to where it was before and the flame and books will be brighter. The feathering should help things remain natural.

Edit: I forgot to answer the question about color. Since the fire should be a dominant light source, you should have more orange in the light. You can try color toning. A very simple thing would be to add some orange to highlights using the "saturation 2 colors’ tool Color Toning - RawPedia