Photoshop - Retweaking the DVD Inlay

One of the things I was least happy about with the DVD inlay was my attempts at compositing Duke Nukem into the Doom picture. Duke always stood out from the rest of the image and it therefore lacked believability.

One of the reasons was due to the reflections from light sources which were very apparent on the Doom figure but totally absent from Duke. Also Duke has slightly more saturated colours whereas the Doom scene in general was lacking in colour depth.

I set about trying to make some changes to see if I could improve things at all.

Here is the original version:

Here is the amended version:

There were two main things that I changed. The first was upping the saturation amount on both the main front picture and then the rear picture so that the colour tones were more evenly matched.

This makes the picture seem warmer and I think the colour difference between Doom and Duke is less pronounced on the amended version however some of the fine detail has been lost or reduced slightly. Overall a tradeoff I think it is worth making, especially given as how the brighter more saturated colours grab your attention more forcefully, useful on a game cover to attract prospective buyers.

The other effect was to add some red light reflections to Duke so he looks more like he is actually part of the scene than in the original. The main areas where Doom guy has these red light reflections are on his legs so this was the area that I wanted to add them to Duke.

As I keep copies of all the stages on the project it was easy for me to go back to my original image with all the layers still available to manipulate. I therefore added another layer on top of all the others and set to work adding the red highlights.

To do this I used the eyedropper tool to match the colour of a reflection on Doom guy's legs and then using the paint tool and a small paint brush size, around 6 pixels and fading from the inside to the outside, I started to apply the red colouration to Duke's lower legs up to the knee area, Then I added extra layers to the inside of his thighs, again trying to match the reflections on Doom guy.

In order to still retain the underneath detail of Duke's outfit I then adjusted the transparency (opacity) of the layer on which I had painted the red highlights from 100% down to around 35%. This gives the impression of a red tinge without losing the underlying detail. It's not perfect but I think it is an improvement and does help to make Duke look more like he belongs in his surroundings.

I'm still getting feedback from people as to whether they thing the changes are an improvement or not and whether there is anything else I should be tweaking, possibly the saturation down a touch or two.

I'll update with any further changes and to confirm which version I will present as the final one.

[Update: After receiving feedback from multiple people it appears as though everybody prefers the amended version citing better colour and a more believable front image. Whilst I think matching the hue / saturation levels between the front and back images makes the text on the rear slightly harder to read nobody else seemed to find this an issue. I will therefore be submitting the second version as it currently is.]