Here’s a recent movie poster Nouncement.  There were a few things done with this image to incorporate it into a movie poster design:

• Recoloring the upper background area..  Luckily, since the hair was dark, doing a hue shift on the light-colored blanket didn’t require careful selection around the hairs.  If it were blond hair, that may have been more of an issue.
• Reconstruction of hand and blanket on the left.  I just wanted to simplify those overlapping blankets and extend them farther to the left.
• Blending the bottom blanket fold into the background.  Had to rebuild a little of the cloth wrinkle, and fade the cloth out into a similar color for the background.
• Added more stars to the background.  Just copied and pasted rotated versions of the stars that are higher up on the blanket, to give the feel that the blanket kind of continues down to the bottom.
• Dodging and burning on the skin.

It’s a fun picture – I love how her bottom lip is shifted under her top lip.

This picture is an example of where you have to just take a picture fast, while you have the moment, and you don’t have time to adjust the background or you’ll miss your chance.  Sometimes it’s just easier to come in with Photoshop afterwards in these cases.

Here are the things done to enhance the image:

• Cloned out the restroom sign in the background so it wasn’t distracting
• Recolored the front left wall to be the same color as the rest of the walls (again, to not be distracting, and pull your eye away from the focal point)
• Brought up shadows in general a bit, and then painted some subtle brightness on their faces with a soft big brush.

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.

Here’s a movie poster announcement we finished recently. The picture itself didn’t really need much work at all. Most of the work was integration into the poster design.

Here’s a list of some things that were done:

• Covered most of the top background with a pink-to-white gradient.  I painted a mask for it so it didn’t make the white above the baby turn pink.
• Added some saturation and contrast to the picture, especially the pink clothing and the skin.  I made the contrast of the feet area more defined, as that area was a little close to the color of the white sheet next to it, and I wanted it to pop off the white better.
• The sheet highlights weren’t completely white, so to help the transition from white sheet to white at the bottom of the poster, I added a curves adjustment layer to boost the highlights more, and then painted a mask to only have it affect the bottom part completely.

As always, you can see a slightly bigger version of this and other nouncement examples at our gallery page.