I used to be an unbeliever in the whole shooting-in-Raw concept.  Of course, knowing the way images work from a computer graphics background, I understood the theory behind why it should be useful, but I just didn’t see the applicable importance of shooting in RAW format in real life.  The problem was that I just hadn’t had the right images to see comparisons with.  One day the light clicked on for me (it takes a while for some of us) that the grayish washed-out color I got sometimes when darkening something that was blown out in at least one of the color channels was a result of not having enough color information on the bright end.  And when I used a RAW version of the same photo, I was able to make that color look completely natural when darkening it.  At that point I was almost completely hooked.

› Continue reading…

Here’s a movie poster we did recently.

Here is some of the work done:

• Rotated image to be diagonal .
• Extend the image on the edges  – because there was space in the top corners, I copied the orange polka dot and mirror-flipped it, and fixed up the seam with the clone tool a bit.  On the top right corner it was mostly a solid gold color with a little bit of dodging and burning.
• Cutting out the lower part of the image.  I tend to feel more satisfied if I can make a transition from the image to the background that feels more natural than a simple fade, but the image doesn’t always lend itself to that.  I this case, I liked being able to have the elbow seem to shadow the white background.
• Made the color scheme a little cooler by adding a blue photo filter.  It seemed to fit more with the action movie style.
• Created the crosshairs with 2 vector shape lines, and then painted a simple mask (just 1 click with a round brush!) to make a break in the center.  And then I used white-to-transparent ramps on the mask at the outer edges to fade out the crosshairs.  Since that kind of ramp is additive, you can keep inching it in further without damaging the rest of the mask, as you would if you used a white-to-black ramp.

Here’s a little bit different style of a movie poster announcement from others we’ve done.

Here’s some of the work that was done to make this one unique:

• A little bit of background filling-in with the clone tool (top right corner mainly)
• Instead of fading the image out like many of the other designs do, I decided to keep the edges crisp, and put bars on the top and bottom to distinguish where the picture starts and ends, since the background colors are so close in some areas.  Because of the way the picture was cropped initially, I didn’t want to fade out any more of it (especially the chin), and recreating it would be difficult.
• A fun part was creating the text that lays behind the title.  If you didn’t notice, it says “Love”, in both directions, which was a great idea from the parents.

We’ve been doing a few “action”-style movie posters lately, which has been a little bit of a change.  This one is a fun composite of a few different elements.

The 3 main elements were the baby picture, the flag, and the bomber jacket.  The title is kind of an element in and of itself as well.

Flag:

I used a flag picture I got from fotolia.com, and scaled, recolored and blurred it to work as a background.

Bomber Jacket:

The jacket picture had the arms out to the sides more, and didn’t look like a natural pose.  So I employed the new Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop CS5, which worked really well in this case.  I just placed pin points all over the jacket to lock down areas that needed to stay put, and then warped the arms down into a little more of a “pose”.  It even allows you to pull the jacket arm over top of the stomach part (or behind, if you like).  This would NOT have been an easy job for the liquify tool, and probably would have had to happen in multiple stages, with cloning areas to fix the seams and stretching.

Baby:

Pretty much the normal skin treatment-type stuff here – smoothing out things with a surface blur version over top of the real version, toning down some strong highlights by painting over them with a surrounding color.  Oh, and in this case, a small amount of surgery to cut all the body off!  I also did some shadowing along the edges of the face to make it feel more like it is up against a black jacket, rather than other skin and a light colored background.

Overall it was a fun composite to put together, in a slightly different style than many of the posters.  After all, who can resist a baby in a bomber jacket?