This is a lengthy post (for me) so you may need 5 minutes to get through it all.  More if you click the links.

The Client

Fox Cities Visitors And Convention Bureau

The Assignment

Photograph models on white then create a LARGE Twister mat under them.

First of all, thank you to Shane Van Boxtel for providing excellent photographs to work with.  Thinking ahead to the post production work needing to be done, Shane drew evenly spaced marks on the floor for the models to place their hands and feet.  The result of this forethought, when it came time to place the Twister mat under the models, their hands and feet lined up perfectly with the spots on the mat.  Please take the time to click on Shane’s link above to see more of  his awesome work.

Follow this link to Twister in Wikipedia.  It provides a little history and culture of the game.  Well, I found it interesting anyway.

To begin the project I needed a photo of the models.  Note, you can see the marks on the floor.

I then needed to separate the models from the rest of the photo so The Twister mat could be inserted.

That was easy.  Next came the hard part.  I needed to make the mat and have it look real.  It required proper color, and creases to simulate being folded.  After all, the game mat spends the better part of its life scrunched up in a box, shoved to the back of the top shelf in a cramped closet.  The color was easy, red, blue, yellow and green spots against a white background.

Creating the folded texture was more challenging.  To do this I folded and generally mauled an innocent piece of 8.5×11 copier paper.  I taped said paper to a light booth so the light would strike it at a steep angle accentuating the newly created topography.  See my exciting paper photo.

Still reading?  Good!  Lets move on.  I married the Twister spots and the innocent paper using a technique called Displacement Mapping.  This is waaaay too lengthy to cover here.  Trust me, it works, see the next photo for proof.

Click the photo for a larger view, to see the texture better.

Now to place the mat under our models.  A single mat just wasn’t enough, this needed to be Super Twister!  How about three across and three deep, that’s nine mats.  This GIANT Twister mat required a significant amount of distortion and perspective adjustment to attain the receding perspective necessary to create the illusion of a large space.

Not done yet.  The models are still floating over the mat.  Using the real shadows from the original photo I created new shadows and applied them to this file.  With shadows, the models appear to be “grounded” on the Twister mat.

Click the photo for a REALLY BIG impressive version.

That’s about it.  I told you it was long.  If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

Oh, almost forgot.  I had to do this for five photos.  Once the mat was created I reused it, all that other stuff I did, multiply it by five.

The project aim was to reduce the rusty look of the product.  After speaking with the client (Jeff Amstutz at A2Z Design) it was decided I would simply reduce the red color of the rust while maintaining the actual color of the caked dirt on the trenching belt.  Here is the original look.

I took the file into Lab color to render the color on the 16 foot boom arm and belt completely neutral.  I then masked back the areas of dirt and brushed back partial colors in select areas.  I also created an alpha channel based on the luminosity layer and applied that to the mask to bring back partial color in areas based on brightness.  I then flattened the image, converted to cmyk where I enhanced the yellows, saturated colors and enhanced contrast and sharpness.This is a simplified version of a 2 hour retouch job.  Here are the results.

This project stems from an earlier job where the end files were in black and white (gray scale).  For that project the background needed to be black and I needed to add motion to the belt, as though it was running.

The other image associated with this project was more difficult.  Still, it needed motion, however one of the steel plates on the belt had no teeth, it had a blade instead.  That blade needed to be removed and replaced with teeth.  After cannibalizing a plate, teeth and bolts from other areas of the file I was able to distort and warp them into place to make the necessary changes.

Hi all.  It was kind of a do nothing weekend at my house.  We played games and watched movies.  I want to cover how to make a static photo a little more interesting.

I shot this photo a few years ago and I like it but it doesn’t seem to draw your interest to the main subject, the bride and groom.  Here is how I decided to resolve that.

1. I used the cropper and selected the entire file.  I then checked the box in the menu bar titled “perspective” and pulled the top right corner down a bit and the bottom right corner up a bit to reduce the left to right receding perspective.

2. I duplicated the background layer and changed the blending mode to “multiply”.  This darkens the entire photo substantially.

3.  I added a layer mask to the duplicate layer and used the elliptical marquee tool to create a selection where I wanted the “spotlight” to fall.  By using the “transform selection” option under the “select” drop down menu I was able to skew and elongate the ellipse into the shape I desired.  I then filled my selection on the layer mask with black.  I did this again for the spotlight facing the opposite direction.

4.  Once I had my spotlights laid in I blurred the layer mask 15 pixels to create a soft edge on the spotlight.

This whole process took about 5 minutes and now the photo has an X created by the two spotlights which leads the eye directly to the subject.

This is an example of my Photoshop work.  The model was actually on the cliff face (hazard pay?).  I extended the photo to the left by adding more lake and trees, added a sky, changed the models shoes, removed the rope holding the model, altered the rock structure on the cliff, added the pepper plant, turned the peppers red, added extra peppers and leaves, added the small plants to the (new) cracks in the cliff face, added a shadow behind the pepper plant, altered the models skirt then applied color and contrast adjustments to achieve the final look.  Whew!