Very nicely done tutorial. It's informative without being long winded. Also, a very pretty final piece. I like the lighting on the pen itself, with the different stripes of light highlighting the different textures of the pen cap vs the pen body.

My only complaint is the black-on-black of the pen cap and the ink bottle. The pen kind of morphs into the bottle, without a really clear delineation of either.

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~Apophysis
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"At most given moments the universe is not necessarily your friend, or even your enemy. It just looms a lot and makes you twitchy." *keight
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Yes, the lack of a contrast edge is a little annoying. With time in retouching, this would be repaired. I don't have lightpipes and don't usually have the time to set up complex reflector sets (though, I guess it depends on your definition of complex, as I tend to favor heavily modified source) to rough in all of the little things. Plus, I have the benefit of having a retoucher on staff.

Since I may shoot anywhere between 1000 silos and 50 lifestyle shots a month, there is some fine tweaking that I leave to post.

Also, since the goal here was to document the process, I didn't want to go too hog-wild with the retouching, as I think the end "result" should match what the reader has seen progress.

Of course, there's a lot that I've omitted about ratios, etc, etc. I'm not a great teacher, but I do like to share information!

It was information well shared! I don't plan on doing any of that sort of work, but it is quite interesting to learn about it - new knowledge is fun. And, who knows, it may come in useful someday.

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~Apophysis
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"At most given moments the universe is not necessarily your friend, or even your enemy. It just looms a lot and makes you twitchy." *keight
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I miss you!