are these pixels photo/color-reduced?...

[CassC9]

I feel dumb for asking this but I saw some pixels someone made on DA and wondered if they are real or color-reduced, or maybe the term is photo-reduced. not sure... either way I'm also kind of wondering how you can better be 100% sure these things are true in a picture? I feel like I see this stuff a lot and I'd hate to comment on something in saying 'good job' or anything if it's fake and whatnot. well here are the deviations I was curious about:
http://xcaptainvalo.deviantart.com/art/Weep-Myself-Alive-80112930?q=&qo=
http://xcaptainvalo.deviantart.com/art/Smoke-x-Ville-Valo-76986890

especially the second one..(the smoke...)
I am also not sure if I should be asking this here...sorry if so..

EDIT: **link fixed on second one. it's not that it bother me too insaneley much,... kind of sad too look at all the comments of everyone praising them as a pixel god, though, when it seems pretty fake. Like what St0ven said pretty much...

[Helm]

Gut instinct says photo reduce then manual shuffling about. Too many pixel clusters a computer would consider good ideas but a human being not, but you can never be sure. And is it so important to be 100% sure? This art would benefit from a finer pass in pixel precision but that has little bearing on what it means to you, if anything. It's not masterpiece-craftsman quality if it's straight-pixelled, it's not masterpiece-computer-reduction quality if it's computer reduced, so in that middle area, why is it so important?

The second link doesn't work.

[Cow]

Internet detective to the rescue:



Searching for an image in Tineye can bring up the reference if it's close enough, but not always. It's a good way to check if you want to be sure though.

[Indigo]

he actually supplied the reference in his description

edit:  and its definitely a reduce-and-edit job at a perfect 50% scale to his source image

[bengo]

Deviantart is allowing this to stay up? The hell?

[Jakten]

Deviant art allows a lot of horrible things to stay up. Too many people make gifs from clips of music videos or TV shows and the weirdest thing is people complement and praise them??

[JJ Naas]

Yeah, lol -images made from ripped photos are apparently valid on dA.

[WM]

As are traces of copyrighted images: dA said to themselves. 

[st0ven]

yeah read the descriptions - the first link that image used as reference was at least supplied to let people know what the source was from. In the second post he comes right out and says that hes overlaying his 'clusters' over top the original to 'see how close' he was, and apparently was a bit out of reach for him otherwise.

I wouldnt get bent out of shape over it either. theres lots of cool images youll find that if you saw a step by step process (this happens on youtube vids ALL THE TIME) - theyre actually tracing over their source images for the entire lineart phase (my favorite is in the end when they do the before / after images of the photo and result. of COURSE its going to look like her!).

DA is more of a social site more than it seems to be an art site, so you kindof have to expect people to do things like this to get lots of praise and attention from people who thought it was done more conventionally. what i find amusing is how proud of himself he is in the descripts ^_^.

imo these types of works every time i see them i kindof roll my eyes a bit. theyre great for exercise and skill building (granted youre not tracing the whole time) but in the end make bad portfolio/gallery pieces.