Although I do like how some of the rain drops are enlightened in red I find the effect to be a little overdone. There are red drops one metre behind the car and I find this to be unrealistic. However the biggest fault is that all of the rain drops point in the exact same direction.
Also you see no sign of rain on the car itself. There is not a single bit of water thrown up by the tyres whereas the road is so wet it looks like a mirrir which is the next unrealistic looking thing, roads are built so that rain can run off to on or both sides.
Now that you look in the "mirror" three things are strange: The mirrored car is squeezed vertically, it is not blurred horizontally (which resulst in very sharp vertical lines) and on top the mirrored car is out of perspective since I assume it is only a copy of the original car in the picture.
What I was earlier criticising were the skid marks. Their path is too much of a curve for a car that seems to be going so fast, for me it looks totally strange since the car in the screenshot is obviously in control(neither weight shift nor steering to the sides). Talking about the lack of steering angle the locking rear wheel makes no sense to me either but that could be just me. Do I have to mention how realistic I find utterly dark skid marks on a very very wet road to be?
A matter of technical correctness (which I do not know too much about) are the glowing brake discs. I believe before on a stock 115bhp hatchback your discs could glow your brake fluid would have boiled heavily so you had no chance to survive the previous three corners.
OK I wasn't around for some time, this post is an all-in-one reply
Thank you very much for all your compliments and criticisms, I should explain the following with the picture, but it's never too late eh ?
No rain drops flying / No dashed water: I know, and I'm as displeased as those who notice that. I tried my best, but it was simply one step ahead of my phosotshop skills. I was not satisfied with the "realism" of anything I tried, so I decided to do nothing instead of coming up with something "ugly". So we have a car which can literally drive through the raindrops.
No sign of rain on the car: Come on, it doesn't look dry does it ? It just doesn't "interact" with rain..
Locked Up Rear Wheel: I'd like to thank for previous explanations, yeah it does lock up. It's easy to see small hatchbacks cornering on 3 wheels. That locked tire in that picture IS in the air, but the angle just wont let you notice that.
Vertical squeeze / Perspective weirdness: Thats the closest realism I can get to, pardon my lack of imagination, tho I think the whole perspective "trick" (yeah it's the duplicate of original image) is satisfactory.
Reflection blur: I just wanted to keep the details. To be honest, after editing this picture, I started to notice the reflections of cars on rainy days. And unless there's a pond on the surface, or a road completely wet with a thin layer of water, you see nothing but just the reflection of (head/tail)lights - with a heavy blur. Actually I can dodge this problem with claiming "oh it's my art, it's the way I wanna show the emotion, bla bla" but it wont save me right ? :P
Skid Mark: The problem is reflection. The road reflection claims "this is one hell of a wet surface" while what I intended to do is just some ponds. I dont know if one can leave skid marks on a damped/wet asphalt, let's say I just assumed it.
Skid Mark Curve: This is the most disturbing detail for me. I wanted to tell that the car is about to dive into the curve, and to "emphasize" the locked up wheel. Apparently trying that with a curved skidmark is a lousy idea.
Misc:
Believe or not, there's a $hitload of weight shift on that XFG. My setup was hard track with low-pressure front tires, brakes adjusted to full front and dont-know-how-much-but-too-much power, and add 190 kg of weight on %100 front of the car. I slammed on the brakes at the end of BL1 straight with +160 kph and dived in. The reason for this strange setup is to show suspensions squeezed in front and stretched in rear, for a more dramatic view - yet it was not enough to show it on 3 wheels. Why it looks "too in control" is just because the narrow field of view, and the angle. And there is a steering input, which locked up that inside wheel. It was really locked up and in the air when I took the screenshot.
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I don't believe there's a chance that an XF GTI can make its brake discs glow either, but there's no XF GTR in demo.
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I was stuck in demo for a long time, I have ~4000 laps on BL1 with XFG with a PB of 1:33:67, and I guess I can claim that I'm no noob. I'm S2 licensed for a only couple of months, I usually race on IHR for now.
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I'm no photoshop guru, I have some difficulties in conveying the ideas from my imagination to the canvas - "skill" is the word for it I guess.
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So that's the story. Please don't think that I'm rejecting your comments, it's the comments why I share this screenshot here. I may have picked the wrong words or expressions while writing this post (as you might have noticed, english is not my primitive language), hope I did not come up with a "dont criticize me" kind of a tone.
Don't mind your language. Of course you should always try to improve it but to make your self understandable here your english is just fine for me (for whom english is not the native tongue either).
I understand your points and I too noticed too many times that the effects I tried to copy could be different from the actual outcome. Thus and being a bit of a perfectionist I often avoided finishing an edit on half the way. I do know my edits are not perfect either and I wasn't trying to insult you personally but I just like to criticise things because for me the only way to improve over my own limits is to get hints and mistakes pointed out by others.
So please, keep things going I guess you are a pleasant guy and you have enough self-criticism to do very nice screenshot edits soon.:magnify:
are you kidding? your photoshop skills are amazing in my eyes!
its my background btw
the only thing that bugs me is the skidmark, if you still have it saved in layers then you should make less of a curve, and less dark and it will be perfect, and instead of the main curve being away from the car have it be more toward the car