This blog isn’t really about music, but I justify this post a tiny bit because I occasionally post some movie-related things, and this is music for movies!  Composing is another hobby I’ve had for a while, and the last few years I’ve gotten into orchestral composing more.  You’ve got to have a break from doing baby announcements all the time, right?  Anyway, this is my first real attempt at something that could work as soundtrack music.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.

I got the new version of Photoshop, and while I haven’t had a ton of time to play around with it yet, I did take advantage of the puppet warp on my last project (which I’ll blog about in a future week).  I had an image of a jacket in an arms-straight-out pose that I wanted to composite onto a baby, with a more natural pose for the arms.  It took a few minutes to get the hang of it, but very quickly I was able to bend one arm (even overlapping the torso part of the jacket!) and lower the other one in what looks like a fairly natural way, as far as the creases go.  There was no obvious stretching or smearing, which is a huge win over the Liquify tool, where everything tends to stretch/smear and then you have to go back and reconstruct until you have something that works.  I also appreciate greatly the way it’s tied directly into the normal interface, and doesn’t (like Liquify) take you into a separate dialog box to do that work and then put the results back into the “real Photoshop” when you’re done.  It also automatically warps your layer mask, which Liquify didn’t do, which always was making a mess.  I could have done this job with Liquify, but I’m guessing it would have taken about 45 mins, rather than the 5 mins it took with Puppet Warp.  Nice!  And even if the posing aspect of the tool isn’t something you use in every situation, I think its general warping abilities will get a lot of use, especially as easy as they are.

If you haven’t heard much about this new feature yet, I recommend this youtube video that shows it in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nAklIkMy4g&feature=player_embedded

There are about 3-5 major features (in my area of interest) that are in the new PSCS5, probably any of which would make the upgrade worthwhile, so to have so many are fantastic!  I’ll blog about more of them as I get a chance to use them.

This is our first nouncement done for an adoption, so that was fun.  Here are some of the things I did to enhance the image to work well as a movie poster:

• Cloned out the thing behind her head in the background to simplify the background more.  I also tried to soften the left edge of the shadow on the background by her cheek.
• Recreated the top of the head and hood so we could have the picture down lower in the frame and not have to fade out at the top.  I was able to use surrounding areas to make a believable section across the top.
• Used a grass-shaped paint brush with scattering to paint black into the mask between the image and the bottom color.
• A little bit of toning-down the shiny highlights on the skin.

Remember you can see slightly bigger versions of the final product in our gallery.

Here is a fun movie poster announcement we did recently.  It was one of the few that we’ve done that involves a separate  background image.  Here’s a breakdown of the work done on both images:

Background Image

• Lightened it up dramatically (using Adobe Camera Raw for all the major color correction)
• Painted out people in the distance, and made a blown-out glow fill that area, extending into the buildings.
• Painted out a streetlamp that was getting in the way.
• Recolored the side of the building to look more like brick colors

Baby

• Cut out the top portion of the background of the image, so we could see through to the background.  Since he had dark hair, this was done using 2 different layers of the boy.  1) Detailed version of the hair in Multiply mode over the background to get the nice hair edges.  2) Less detailed “choked”-mask version pasted (in Normal mode) on top of that.
• Added a rim lighting effect on the side of his head, since it seemed to fit with the background glow.  This was done by adding an inner shadow in Color Dodge mode, and using the layer mask to paint out areas I didn’t want light to be on.  If I remember right, using Screen mode instead just made a soft light area along his hair, so it didn’t look as much like each hair was being hit differently with light.
• Lightened up the whole image, and then had to suppress the highlights that were even brighter afterwards.

Obviously a fair amount of retouching and color correction work here.  If you’re interested in having any photos retouched (outside of an announcement order) we can do that too.  Just contact us on the Contact page for a quote.