Technical Slop

Scope of Reflection

It is all wrong. Truly.

Something in the back of my mind has been nagging me as being wrong. Something was missing. So I really started to seriously study shiny objects. I now know what all of my shiny, reflective things have been missing: scope of reflection.

Thanks to cyoung, I can illustrate what I'm talking about. He has been kind enough to take some photos for me.

First, let's consider this two shiny balls:

Two things to pay attention to:

1. The fact that you can see the ceiling and the floor.
2. The distortion on the ceiling fan.

Ceiling and floor? Yeah. Pretty big scope of reflection, isn't it? If you are standing in a room and take a regular photo, how likely is it that you will get the ceiling and floor? Not very.

(A sphere is a bit of an exaggerated example, but the idea of scope of reflection does apply to a great number of objects that you may create in PhotoShop.)

This should drive the idea home:

Here we have several regular photos taken and stitched together. Several photos! And the floor isn't even in there! Are you starting to catch my drift?

Scope of reflection. All of the shiny things that I have faked with regular photos just plain didn't have the scope of reflection of real objects. It's all wrong on a fundamental level.

I'm going to repeat that: it's all wrong on a fundamental level.

Another thing. Let's focus on that ceiling fan for a second. Here we have it painted in bright red. Can you see it?

Guess what? I can't duplicate that kind of distortion. I have tried and tried and tried to do that with a regular photo, and I just can't do it. I can't.

Answer? The closest thing I have for an answer is to start with a fisheye photo. Although, it's not a complete solution. If you do start with a fisheye photo, you'll have to do some adjusting, but I'll leave that to you to figure out.

That's about it.

play.fiddle.learn