Nighttime Endeavors (Patreon)

I'm running into a kind of funny problem, so I thought I could share another Samantha image while I describe it.

I once shared a tutorial on how I make nighttime images. Basically, I add a layer of transparent black above the whole thing to darken it, and I increase the blue values all by 20 each. Simple, and it's worked nicely so far.

However, Samantha's hair does not want to fucking cooperate. When I perform this operation like normal, you get the second image above (the one with sweat). Do you see how her hair takes on an almost greenish tone and things look a BIT over-saturated? It's not terrible, but the first image...is a lot better in my opinion. It looks more naturally like nighttime.

How did I get the first image? Like so:

Using Blender's Compositor, I do BASICALLY the same thing as I do in Gimp: increase the blues, then cast a transparent black over the whole thing. Blender's color balancing node isn't really 1-to-1 with Gimp's color balancing tool, though, so what I did in Blender was very much trial-and-error until I found something nearly identical to what I was doing in Gimp.

At least, it was nearly identical when the candidate wasn't Samantha. And the only reason I ever worked out how to do this in Blender was so that I could automate the process of converting every frame to night for the sake of animations.

I just find it ironic that my guess-and-check attempt at replicating the Gimp workflow in Blender ended up looking smoother than the original method itself when applied to a different character (without changing any of the settings in Blender). And it's entirely by accident that I realized this, while making Samantha's animations.

Anyway, I need to add sweat to the first image, which isn't QUITE as simple as it would normally be, but I've realized an easy enough solution while writing this. I'll just add the sweat overlay image into Blender's compositor instead of trying to layer it in Gimp, so it can have the nighttime filters applied properly to it as well.

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We're getting into Samantha's post-coital shots! There's light at the end of this tunnel (at least as far as Samantha's image sequence goes)!