CiA #60 - score: 6.5 out of 10

Mongi:
In the last couple of months CiA have really had an upswing and now close to being one of the big groups again after their "revival" (hirez wise).

Blue Devil is really going for other styles and themes other than "Isle of Illusions" now. While the composition of the photomanips aren't bad, I can imagine they would be a lot better if they were sharper and had better image quality.

Digital Interface have his classical rendered surreal pics. They are overall pretty good, but if everything were a bit more realistic it would create a much more complete feeling. For example better textures and not so "bumpy" models.

Dragon have a very good sense of design and layout, but the work don't give much "artistically". They're more suitable for advertisements and such. Now this doesn't mean it's bad at all, it's just different from most of CiA's other work.

Firefromheaven's work isn't as good as it use to be. They're messier and look more like random patches of colors than complex manipulating.

Ghostface have been improving all the time, and is becoming really good. I've followed his work since he came to the scene, and this is his best to date. Especially gf_psy.jpg shows a sense of composing and trying new styles.

Incognito's work is similar to the HRg pics, but not as good. These aren't exactly the same style and look more unstructured, which ruins the overall picture (if Incognito was aiming for the same style).

Ikarus have been cramming out photomanips like crazy. Most of them are completely different to his usual style and it's a welcome change. These have more substance and you can actually see what the pictures are, almost. The usage of different contrasting colors is also a new perspective on his style. As you may know, I'm against photomanips where the used photos are stolen, i.e. not free stock photos or your own photos, but probably copyright material. Now there's one pic that has a lot of kinky stuff, and I doubt it's free material or that Ikarus have taken those photos. Otherwise they're pretty good photomanips.

Lk's pic is kind of interesting. Not special in anyway, but nice to look at. Napalm's frog is quite realistic, with great modeling and textures. Pike has a grossly proportioned girl as usual. As I've said before, the outlines are pretty mediocre but the coloring is quite smooth. Subsonic's pics are also very nice to look at, but doesn't really boggle my mind.

Lastly, I don't know if Agent_42's ADF should count as hirez, but it sure has the same quality as a gif. It's the most advanced ADF I have ever seen, and it must've taken _very_ long time to complete. Making all those chars, and making them fit together as well is very time consuming. It's like drawing ansi but at a higher resolution.

Just a comment on the packing. While better than last month (could it get any worse?), there are still some annoying details. The files aren't packaged in alphabetical order, or any order at all as I can see. And does the info and memberlist really need to be in every disk? Minor details, but still a bit annoying.

score: 6.5

Root88:
Digital Interface's DI_99.jpg was one that I enjoyed. This render has an enormous amount of details in it, and the textures were well done. In fact there was so much detail we could have missed that he gave us a close up view of some of the models in another image in Di_cia.jpg Even though some of the models were reused, both images work well as individual pieces. The only thing I might change is the sky in DI_cia.jpg, it’s not bad, but not to my taste. DI’s keeping it surreal up in the field, a’ight.

Most but not all of the photomanips didn’t hold my interest whatsoever. Most of them looked like the artists took a photo, converted to gray scale, then to RGB and did an image>adjust>variations in photoshop (or something that accomplished the exact same thing). Then once in a while the artist would add a filter or another layer, it didn’t seem like any ideas were trying to be expressed.

My previous statement definitely does not apply to GhostFace’s gf_flwr.jpg photomamip. In fact if GF didn’t inform us that it was, I probably would of thought it was something that he had created from scratch in painter. I feel that a photmanip shouldn’t merely be altering a photograph just so it looks different, the photograph should merely be a canvas for the artist to place his work on. GhostFace accomplished this.

Incognito’s abstract images were done well, but were too contemporary and bland to hold my interest.

Napalm's render of a frog was the closest thing to a photorealistic image I have ever seen in a CIA pack. If I saw this image somewhere other than a groups art pack, I may have just passed over it, thinking that it was a photograph. A good job modeling complimented by excellent textures makes this an outstanding render. Maybe if the leaves were rendered instead of just a photograph, my jaw would have dropped a bit more, but most of us don’t have the hardware to handle a task like that.

Pike’s drawings are pretty good, but the fractally background in Pk_blup.jpg has got to go. I thought fractals went out in the 80’s? PK_girl.jpg got me in trouble at work, so I didn’t like that one at all. :P

Ss_space.jpg 3d rendered spheres. I don’t think I have to say anything else about this one to get my point across.

score: 6