Glenn Divinagracia

BREAKING DOWN PLAYING WITH POSTURE

Last week, I posted the image “Playing with Posture.” I’ve been making these images as part of the Motion+Form Gallery collection. I played with three different software with this one: Poser, Photoshop, and PaintShop Pro.

I wanted to convey the different postures that one can appreciate when looking at the body from the side. There are more postural combinations but I settled with four. I used a character from Poser and tweaked one (3rd from the left) so it had a nice balanced posture. I named the character Zhang. I duplicated Zhang 3 more times and tweaked their postures. The left most, with a swayback; the second with exaggerated lumbar lordosis; the third, the ideal one; and the right most, with a flattened lower back. After rendering the image in Poser, I saved it as a PNG file (Image 4 below). The PNG file allows me to change background colors easily. I then opened the file in Photoshop, added the black background, cleaned and smoothed the images using mostly the clone and liquify tools. I wanted emphasis on the spine and found that the Infrared photo filter worked well. I adjusted the contrast and brightness some until I was satisfied with it. I liked the black and white version but then I wanted to add a hint of color. I played with the Nik Sofware filters found in Corel’s Paint Shop Pro and used the Pink Bi-Color filters. And that’s about it. After having edited this in a not-so ideal sitting posture for probably a couple of hours, I thought I’d straighten up and stretch my back a little bit. You can find the finished image at www.motionplusform.com.