Nun stripping anime A Certain Magical Index has been the subject of an interesting pilgrimage, with an intrepid 2channeler making photographic comparisons of the various city scenes in the anime, and their real life counterparts around Tachikawa station.
Tachikawa station itself, surprisingly enough, is situated in in Tachikawa City, one of the belt of tiny villages and hamlets (relatively speaking) which surround Tokyo proper.
A Certain Magical Index probably has the best animation of the season, so it is unlikely we will hear anyone complaining about it; in fact many laud such techniques as being a prudent use of the limited resources available to animate with, freeing up labour for critical animation elsewhere, such as with pantsu. Generally, excesses seem to be avoided.
You may also wish to take a look at other recent photoshop anime comparisons: Kannagi and Clannad.
personally i love it when they do this^~^ seeing the real settings is just so cool (the real hinamizawa gave photos gave me chills down my spine haha)
plus its AWESOME for cosplay photos, you cant get a better background for good cosplayers than original settings
As long as they’re not beginning to stick real photographs as background, using real places as backgrounds in anime adds a nice touch of connectivity towards the fans.
I’ve read tutorials in making Mangas. when they try to draw realistic backgrounds, they try to take a picture or get pictures from newspaper and trace it under a thin paper, then do the details, maybe they did the same here only that they used image editing tools to colorize.
I’m quite sure this isn’t photoshop, you can see the bridge is completely CG over a background. So that’s more like looking at templates and applying similar structures in. That’s hardly photoshop, and completely unlike Someday’s dreamer where they just animate over a photograph rather than this.
I’m just using Photoshop in the loosest possible sense here, in that they opted to base a their location on a photograph very closely. And no one would dream of comparing it to Someday’s Photoshoppers.
Its not so evident “Photoshop”. Rather ‘follow the example’ that simple use of filters.