Here’s another movie poster baby announcement we did a few months ago.

And, like usual, here’s a list of the types of things we did in Photoshop to finesse the image:

• Darkened the background by duplicating the original image layer, setting it to the Multiply blend mode, and painting white into a mask on that layer to specify where to make the background dark.
• Shifted the skin color.  The exposure was just too yellow in the skin tones, so we created a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer that desaturated the yellow-pink range and shifted it more towards red, and then painted a mask where we wanted that effect to happen, which was just in the skin areas.
• A little bit of dodging and burning on the skin, to add some more shape.  Iff you look at the forearms, you can see how they’re darker towards the sides, and lighter in the center, more so than in the original.

It’s a pretty cute pose, that we’re amazed they were able to pull off.  (Having a newborn of our own, that would not have been possible for us to do!)

Here’s a movie poster baby announcement we did recently for the arrival of our 4th child.

Here’s a list of some of the Photoshop
work that was done:

• Got rid of a slobbery wet spot (that was more noticeable when the blue sweater got brighter) and the beige dog on his sweater with the clone and healing tools.
• Colored the zipper handle blue to be less distracting.
• Extended the cabinet top horizontally with the clone tool (being careful to keep the reflections consistent)
• Cloned out the mommy’s head (as she had to hold the baby up from behind)
• Rotated the image a bit to get the top of the cabinet to be square on the card.
• Brightened up the colors a bit, especially the blues.
• Added text to the book spine

Here’s a post about the baby’s perspective on the photo shoot:
Baby Photo Shoot Details

Another movie poster design:

Here is some of the work done on this one:

• Added some lavender coloring to the background.  To get the fades in and out, there’s a solid lavender layer behind the baby image.  The baby image has a layer mask.  In that mask the gradient tool was applied to make a gradient up by the head (which then had to be cleaned up a little with some painting over the head area so the hair wasn’t lavender).  It was applied again at the bottom (with a white-to-transparent mode to add to the other gradient and not destroy it), and then again finessed a bit with a paint brush to not make it an even fade out across the image, and allow the hands to be fully opaque.
• The shadows in the skin were lightened up a bit, especially in the face.

You can see this and other images slightly larger in our gallery.

Here’s a recent movie poster announcement design, with some of the work done below:

• Lightened the image overall.
• In the process of lightening, the outfit would have been a similar color to the surrounding fabric, so we let the outfit go more towards white, and loosely painted the background fabric a pinker color (in color blend mode).
• Because of the amount that things had to be lightened, the skin color needed some adjusting once it was light enough.  We used a HSV adjustment layer to add more yellow, as it was quite pinkish/purple otherwise.
• The top fadeout is almost just a simple gradient, but it seemed to make sense to keep the head from fading out at the top, so the mask had a gradient first, and then we painted white where the head was to keep it opaque while the surroundings faded out on the sides.
• The title was fun to work on as well, as there are quite a few layers and effects in there.  The most interesting parts are a gradient from maroon to red to purple, and some white dots to look like stars in a sunset sky.

This one also had a little extra meaning, as the father is a real movie critic!  Congratulations to you both on your new addition!

Here’s a recent movie poster announcement for twins:

• Here are some of the things that were done (most of which are pretty visually obvious):
• Masked out the top portion of the background, with a soft gradient at the connection point, kind of like they are on a cloud.  The bottom part of the blanket made for a nice gradual transition, as it was so close to white already. 
• Used a picture of the planes as a background.  There were more in the original picture, so some had to be removed.  And the contrail didn’t go long enough on the bottm plane, so it needed to be extended a bit with the clone tool.
• Changed the skin tones to be a bit more brown and less pink, using a hue saturation adjustment layer and roughly painting over the area for a mask.
• To create the text in the title/logo, I had to manipulate points on the T and the right S to stretch them out.
• The chrome look mostly comes from a color gradient applied to the text.  It goes from Blue to white, then brown to light yellow.  Pretty standard chrome coloring.  I actually used the same gradient on the red bars, but with less opacity, and the bars had a red color instead of white like the text.

Not too often that we get to do twins!