March 3rd, 2006 |
I've got a Photoshop tutorial for you. As a graphic designer, I recently had the pleasure of working on a freelance CD cover and booklet design for an old friend of mine, Inga. She's a multitalented musician who has just released a major CD entitled Riding the Wind (no, not Ghost Ridin' the Whip). It was for this project that she contacted me.
I thought I'd share with you a tutorial of sorts on the process it takes to go from a simple photo to a dramatic finished piece. Now, with all fairness I have to say that we didn't end up using the concept I'm presenting here. Because the initial photography was quite grainy, no real amount of Photoshopping would have enabled the image to both look dramatic and refined while staying true to the subtle details of Inga's face - unfortunate, but it makes sense. For reference, click here to see how the cover ended up.
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So, here's the original picture that was sent to me. Pretty grey, pretty grainy...click here to see an example of the source photo at 100%.
Now, it's important to remember that this isn't really their fault. You can't blame them for not having a big photography budget. I just did a photoshoot with a client through work and it ended up costing them about $15,000.
Anyway, this is where it ended up.
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This is more of a walkthrough than a tutorial...I'm going to assume you already have a comfortable hold on Photoshop and are proficient in moderate to advanced photo editing.
First thing's first. We want to set up the document for the proper size, bring the source photo in, and rotate and scale it to our liking for a nice, dramatic composition.
Since the key words for this piece are going to be "dramatic, dreamlike, ethereal storytelling" I want to punch up the contrast as much as possible without blowing out details. As you can see in the next image I've added several adjustment layers with appropriate layer masks to get things rolling.
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I'm not too concerned about the sky right now, and you'll see why in the next step.
The first thing that bugged me about the source photo - and this is a very common issue with photographs - is that she sky is particularly boring. Okay, at least it's not flat blue-grey, but it certainly lacks that lyrica and dramatic quality we want.
So I picked up a replacement for the sky. I pulled an old photo from my personal collection. Something with some more detail to it; some more texture going on.
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After silhouetting out Inga from the background sky, I also duplicated the cloud again and distorted them by squishing them down on the horizon and setting the layer style - the only thing my cloud picture lacked was a dramatic amound of detail on the horizon.
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Okay, now we're getting somewhere. After doing some color correction on the water and some very initial skin tone correction, the next thing that needed to be added to this photo was some way more expressive hair. Inga's hair looks great when she's standing still in a posed shot, but when she was running down a windy beach we lost all of the dramatic texture and flow of it.
So I pulled some hair off of a Google image search. I do feel pretty bad about this, but it's not like I had another source and there was no point in trying to reshoot the photo.
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Using the Quick Mask (hotkey: Q) mode, I painted out the stock girl's face, then distorted the image to fit Inga's pose, and did some illustration of hair to fit it all in to a more natural look. Not too bad, I think.
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Now we're getting somewhere good. I could have left the image at about this stage, done some more skin tone corrections, and called it a day. The problem was it just didn't feel rich enough. If it's supposed to be the dramatic artwork for a CD cover, it really needs to push some boundaries.
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I spent hours painting and repainting skin tones to try and fix the blurry and noisy original photo. I think I did alright, but I'm certainly no Linda Bergkvist.
I continued to push she contrast. So now what had started out as a grey and boring day had turned into a brightly saturated almost Maxfield Parrish scene and now is getting pushed even further to bring in dark brooding color schemes. One important technique here is to do something like this: put a hue/saturation adjustment layer over the whole canvas at maybe 20% opacity, drag the saturation down to zero, and then set the layer to overlay - it can really give a dark and almost gritty feel to the colors.
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The next set up changes included two things: pushing the skin tones even further, and adding a night sky with some stars. The dreamy surrealistic feel is achieved by a deliberate combining of two different kinds of sky. At the horizon, the bright sky and ochre clouds are a sharp contrast to the foreboding clouds and dream-like night sky at the top of the canvas. Inga appears lit by a completely separate light source.
An there we have it. That's pretty much it! I do wish we had been able to use this image, and to that end it's important to note that the better your source photo is, inadvertently the better your end product will turn out.
One final step for this is that when you over-process photoshop documents they look plastic and fake. I like to flatten the image and add a very slight noise layer - it just gives a little more of a natural photographed texture.
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If you continue to page 2 of this article, I have a bunch more photos of the progression of this cover taken from much closer up on Inga and the clouds and hair.
Also, don't forget to check out Inga's page on MySpace where you can listen to a couple tracks.
(see closeups on page 2!)
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