Before and After
This weekend's images gave me an excellent opportunity to really get back into Photoshop.
It started with this picture of Jeff.
Then I color balanced the image and darkened the tones.
After that, I thought it would look great with a cross-process color balance added to it. Cross-process refers to the process where you develop color-negative (print) film with the chemicals for slide film or vice-versa. It ultimately messes up the colors, but this is a good thing if it's what you want.
Then I showed it to everyone; it seemed to work. But that was a mistake, since the image really wasn't finished. Jeff and I had always envisioned this with him sitting in an old recliner with duct tape on it.
So I went back in to Photoshop. I found an image of the chair on Google images, then found the tape there as well. I search using REALLY LARGE FILE SIZE settings since the image of Jeff is 650 MB.
This is the chair that I picked from a furniture store web site. It's facing the wrong direction, but that's easily fixable.
I was surprised to find so few images of duct tape. This was the only one that seemed usable.
Anyway, off we go to fixing the image.
So I took the elements: the chair, the can, Jeff, the tape and began playing a little. First, clipping out Jeff from the background, then the can. Now they are separate movable elements. This is important, since when I put the chair behind Jeff, the can has to go somewhere.
Next, I need Jeff to look like he is sitting in it, so I warped the chair with the "warp" tool under transform to make it the right angle and perspective (this is a little harder than it looks since when you sit in a chair you make it tilt depending on how you are sitting). Luckily, Jeff was sitting at about the same eye level as if he were in the chair... lucky me.
Now comes the can, which is more difficult, because it is now sitting on a higher vertical plane. So I had to force the can to tilt downward, and then give it a shadow on Jeff's arm since it is now in the way of the light source.
Last but not least was the duct tape. Tape is weird, since it takes the shape of whatever it is being taped to. And with only one sample to go from this makes it harder (especially since I don't have a chair like the one that I took from Google Images), required turning and liquefying it until the tape met with the shape of the different sections of the chair.
Anyway, after about 5.5 hours of work, this is the result. A much larger image can be viewed at
http://www.steveguyer.com/forjeff/high-res.jpg
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