#pixelponders

So obviously not a whole lot of changes.

The main ones being removing the light spot on his forehead and removing some of the darker shadows such as under his mouth. The forehead spot is still lighter but I reduced it heavily as well as feathered the edges out immensely

I do have a version where I just simply lightened the under mouth shadow rather than fully removing it.

I could say I removed it cause I don't think it makes sense for it to be that pronounced given the direction of the lighting or that I don't recall the anime ever adding that shadow there even when lighting was more prominent during season 1.... but truthfully those are just justifications after the fact. I simply just didn't like it lol

I moved the eyebrow shadows a little and overall feathered the edges of some shadows with the airbrush tool. Its more noticable of a change on the left side though not by much and truthfully I think that shadow still is very much wrong.

I did remove one of the smaller shadows by his eye as I felt the line there did enough that it was not needed at all. I considered adding more lines around the eyes like the manga but ended up not doing so because I am just doing this all on my phone rn and also because I would worry about overdoing it like I felt the shading here was.

Take for example these two screenshots.

I kinda don't really like how the shading looks in these two. Nagumo's scene is slightly better because it doesn't linger too much but it does feel slightly off and I think its in part cause of the shading.

I think this is even more noticable on Nagumo's shirt. The first is from the teaser we got at the end of cour 2 and the 2nd is the newest teaser. Obviously lighting has been changed inbetween these two scenes but the shading on the shirt is uhhhh... a lot

I tried to go back to find any screenshots of more dramatic lighting done in season 1 to try to showcase the difference in how much sharper things feel in the newest teaser comparatively.

Of course gonna be using Shin screenshots for this as he is one of my favorite characters that have enough screentime to do so.

Here is Shin in an earlier episode though this example isn't the best as the lighting isn't particularly harsh. This shows off what I mean by a more duller shading. They really liked the textured almosy lines in the shadows during cour 1. I am so glad they didn't keep up with this as much during cour 2.

Baby Shin here showcases more harsh lighting but as you can see some of the shadow's edges are blurred out. It doesn't feel as sharp as the new teaser.

Again if you look closely you can kinda see that texture I talked about in the first image though I think the texture I am talking about is honestly best seen on Sakamoto during cour 1.

And then we have cour 2 which experimented with more colors to set the environment better I noticed which I absolutely loved. Shin vs Shinaya is a good example of this. The purple tone here is chef kiss.

While the shadows are sharper with less feathering on the edges, there aren't multiple different shades to them. Shin's eye bags and wrinkles are portrayed using just lines, no extra shading needed.

Lastly, here is Shin using his future sight for the first time which is probably the closest dramatic lighting wise to the teaser. The main thing though is they didn't go overboard trying to portray every wrinkle or plane of his face.