Here’s another movie poster that was done recently.  We’ve gotten an abnormal proportion of movie posters recently — but it’s been fun!  Here’s the process the I went through on this one:

• Obviously rotated the image a little, to help the composition, being a tall vertical poster.
• After rotating, there were some spaces that opened up on 3 of the corners, so I cloned in some extensions of existing texture.
• Normal skin pass, and softened some of the harder highlights.
• Darkened and saturated corners of the background, and lightened the face and other areas of the skin.
• For the bottom cityscape, I used a photo of the city, took the channel with the most constrast, and added more contrast so it was just black and white.  Then I multiplied it over the white background, and gave it a blueish color overlay as well.
• The title was fun to make look like a night sky.  Instead of a simple gradient between black and blue, I added a purplish area in the gradient to give it more of a night sky feel.  For the stars I used the noise filter, and then a few iterations of levels, and blurring to get a distribution and size that I wanted.  I found that if there were too many “stars”, it tended to look more like a glittery surface rather than a starry sky.  Hard to see at this size, but I think it turned out pretty well.  To see a bigger version, check it out in our gallery.

Here’s another new movie poster announcement to look at.  On this one, I was struggling to decide whether to cutout the entire background, leaving only the baby, or to leave the close elements, and only cutout the further background elements that were more distracting.  After trying both ways, I liked this way more, because the other way made it look like he was floating in space more, but his posture and clothing folds made it look like he was being held.  Here was the final process:

• I used the liquify tool on the dad’s shirt to make it look more like a pillow he was on (getting rid of the buttons and warping down the top right area to feel flatter).
• To the same end, I cloned out the part of dad’s arm, to make it all the couch fabric pattern.
• To not make either of those background elements compete with the baby as much, I colorized them to be more blue, using a hue/sat adjustment layer, masking off just those areas with some quick paintbrushing.
• Added in a blue ramp background, masked off around the baby, couch, and “pillow”.
• Some dodging and burning to give more shape to the lighting, and to brighten up the center as the focal point.
• General fadeout to white at the bottom (painted, though, as to not be overly uniform, as happens when using a straight gradient).

Visit the gallery to see a bigger version of this and other examples!

This picture almost got thrown out because it was painfully underexposed, and there’s just too much happening in the picture to be very interesting.  Then I noticed the superhuman jump captured on the lower left, as well as the flying saucer that happened to be flying through the frame when I pressed the shutter.  How lucky was that?

These were some of the things done to save the image:

• Crop in tighter on the jumper.  Luckily with the resolution (14MP) of dSLR cameras these days, cropping in like that is very feasible.
• Brightened everything up, enhanced the colors, giving extra saturation to the blues and reds.
• Sharpened the image using a high-pass filter on a copy of the flattened image, then putting it on top of everything in overlay mode.