We don’t get as many cereal box design orders as we do for movie posters, so this was a fun one to do for a change.

• Because of the way the background fabric is pushed up against the baby in the picture, especially pushing his sleeve up over his shoulder, it didn’t seem like it would work well to completely replace the background with a new color.  So we kept the hint of that fabric around the baby, while modifying the color to be more cereal box-like.    We did this by placing a solid color or gradient adjustment layer over top of the baby image using the color blend mode, and cutting out where the baby was.  A mask was also painted to gradually fade out the fabric into that solid color.
• The title text is being warped with the text warp tool, with just a simple bend.
• I made that Stork logo a while back, to be something that could go on lots of cereal box designs.  We haven’t always ended up using it, but I like the little detail that it adds to make it feel more like a cereal box.
• There was also some work to even out the skin tones on the forehead and face.  Most of the issue was just in the lighting, but it seemed worthwhile to tone down the dark redness in the face, and get it closer to the color in the brighter parts of the face.  I think that was done with a hue/sat adjustment layer, to shift the color a little and desaturate it a bit, and applied by painting in the areas in a layer mask that I wanted to adjust.

Here’s a question for all of you – if you were going to make a larger poster of the cereal box design, what size would you choose?  As big as possible, or about the size of a normal cereal box?

This is getting to be a favorite movie title for people.  Work explanation below –

The biggest thing out of the ordinary (or at least more so than ordinarily) was the color correction.  There was a strong orange cast to everything originally, which, when I made the background more pink, looked very strange.  So I made a hue/sat adjustment layer that desaturated oranges, and painted those areas with a mask on the layer in order to not affect everything.  It mainly was happening in the shadowed skin areas.

I’ve noticed that similar movie title requests often come in spurts.  This is one of those cases where we got 2 Newborn Identity requests within about 3 weeks.

Here’s some of the work that was done:

• Most obvious was the background. Because there was some fabric that overlapped the baby in some places, it was going to be weird to cutout the background completely, and the fabric look was kind of nice, but just too busy with all its seams, buttons and varying colors.  So I used a healing brush painting technique I’ve started to like in a lot of cases (which I’ll probably post about in greater detail at some point).  The two main steps are: 1) cover the background with a color layer using the color blend mode, and mask it off so it only covers the background and not the baby. 2) Using the healing brush (and sometimes the new content-aware fill in Photoshop CS5 works similarly) paint over seams to blend between two different pieces of fabric.  If you do this all over the place, and not just right on the seams, you start getting kind of a painterly look, which is nice for a background.
• I also “closed” the gap between snaps in his PJs, using the clone tool, just to make it less distracting.

The previous version had the cross hairs on the title but only used the “O” as the scope ring.  So after seeing both versions, do you like the scope circle around the “O” in the title more or not?

This is one of my favorites of the year.  Pictures of sleeping babies with nice soft lighting are just adorable.

I also really enjoy it when there’s a natural transition area where the image can be faded out to a background color without having to do an obvious fadeout across a torso, for example.  In this case the whitish background makes it easy to transition into a white solid background.  And the horizontal format actually works better in this case to be able to show the whole picture, as you wouldn’t want to lose any of that cute pose.

The main work done on this, besides the typical skin cleanup and softening, was adding the color to the background.  It started out as a gradient from darker pink to a lighter pink, but then needed to be cutout by the baby, at least on the top edge.  The diaper (cover) was hard to cutout accurately, as it blends into the background so much.  So I just had to paint a mask that looked believeable, and make that work.

Having a line and overlapping text in the title was a little different style than others we’ve worked on.

I came across this today, and just thought I’d share.  Really creative and cute idea of taking pictures from up high, down on your baby sleeping on the floor, using the floor as a background stage.  All kinds of fun ideas for pictures that you could do at home too!  There seems to be one new picture a day, more or less.

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