The Final Image!
If you've been looking at my blog over the last few days, thank you. If you've enjoyed the crazy rambling and literal hundreds of images that I have generated in pursuit of this character, Cassandra, thank you. If you've stopped to leave a comment, even more thank you.
I'm pleased to present the final, what I consider to be finished, and final (but probably still possible to improve) version of Cassandra.
The long and short of her story within mythology is:
Cassandra was given the gift of Prophecy by Apollo.
She ignored His advances.
He cursed her, so that no one would believe her prophecies.
As a result, no one heeded her warnings, and the city of Troy burnt to the ground.
This is the scene I have attempted to represent through the generative art work, and it is also inspired in part by the Florence and the Machine song of the same name.
Crying like Cassandra, I
Used to tell the future, but they cut out my tongue
And also:
Everything I thought I knew is falling out of view
And if I run fast enough, could I break apart?
As empires tumble and cathedrals flatten in my heart
Anyway, here is what I started with
This was derived from the prompt:
highly detailed cinematic portrait color photograph of a beautiful ancient greek woman perfect facial symmetry, flames behind, shot in the burning hallway of a ruined temple on fire in flames, figures running around in the background, ultra realistic, depth, beautiful lighting, by richard avedon and annie leibovitz and arnold newman, photorealistic, hyperrealistic, octane, epic composition, hasselblad camera, 35 mm, sharp focus
I then took this image through GFPGAN, to fix the face, then it was into Photoshop for some further adjustments.
Steps taken:
- Neural Filter to change the direction of the Gaze
- Liquify to modify the facial structure
- Dodge and Burn via Curves Adjustment Layers
- Colour Grading and Toning via a masked LUT
- A sharpening layer
And then, here; the final version of all these steps combined:
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