((I honestly had no idea where to put this, so sorry if this is in the wrong place, admins! If it is then by all means, feel free to move it without remorse.))
Well I was bored today and I had a dream last night where I used filters to see behind Soundwave's visor. It was when I woke up that I realized while we can't see a definite picture, we have enough information to create a some-what educated image.
Just a warning, I wasn't sure how this would turn out so I didn't screencap the process. Instead, you get a wall of text. If you're a tl;dr kind of person, just look at the pretty pictures I guess.
All right. The first thing I did was, of course, look for references. I used the above photo from One Shall Rise Part 1 as the main reference, courtesy of mavax from Tumblr. The picture below from Triage was a reference for the eye and marking shapes, which is also from Tumblr, courtesy of r2mich2.
I then opened up GIMP and went to work on 1) Sharpening the face already shown in the image, 2) Subtracting the visor's color overlay to create a better representation of hue, and 3) Adding in the markings revealed in the frame-shot above.
This is the cropped image that I worked with.
I used the lasso tool to select the visor only and adjusted the color balance to take away the blue and purple overlay. Next I deselected the eyes and mouth (as those were the sharpest features shown) and used a filter to get rid of the worst of the articles made from the zoom and the image quality. This already gave the appearance of a sharper view of the face.
The next steps would be to add in the details not shown and edit them to look like part of the image. Using the lasso tool, I selected the eye from the Triage frame and transformed it to account for perspective. I then placed it in the appropriate spot over the red pupil of the first image, resized it accordingly, and set the layer to overlay so that it now showed the red pupil as well as the eye shape. Because of the purple coloration in the other picture it stood out strikingly against the more subdued lighting of this picture, so I had to desaturate, pixilize, and blur to give the appearance of it being a part of the original picture.
I decided not to alter Soundwave's left eye simply because there's not enough information given to recreate an accurate picture, so I compensated by touching up the lighting and recreating the glare on his left side, while also doing the same to a lesser extent on the right for artistic purposes. The most difficult part would be his facial markings, in which I had to account for perspective and relative location. By using a very thin brush and a dark blue color taken from the image, I drew in the lines then highlighted them with a very light blue. After blurring and refining the lines on his left, I made fainter marks on the right and faded them out once they reached the glare. As for the mouth, I had to blur it a bit and touch up the lines to make it look better with the adjustments.
The last step was fading the eye into the glare and using a thin brush to hint at the shape a bit more, then I briefly touched up the colors for his pupil and saved it without even attempting to touch up the rest of his helmet. Sorry, Sounders; I'm just too lazy to care at this point.
But the finished product is so:
Please note that I do not at ALL claim this to be 100% accurate (or even 75% at this point), and the whole thing was just a bit of fun on my part to see what I could do with the image. I'm sure once they actually reveal his face my picture will look very silly and even worse quality than it does now. But thank you to mavax and r2michu for providing the images. I'd love to see someone more competent with photo-manipulation give this another go.
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