Back to Work

This tittle has two meaning, first I am back on the road and second I am done with the directory shoot and can focus my energies back into the seniors before it is too late in the season. One of the features I like to do with seniors is to have a customized design using their schools logo and colors. This can be time consuming at times depending on the detail of the school logo or masthead. Here is an example of a web page with the masthead.

Using the pen tool in Photoshop makes a detailed selection real easy. I must say it takes a little practice to master this tool as you learn how much stretch it will take to create the bezier curves that allows a vector mask to be created. See below for the points that re-created the logo for my use.

With the points and segments established you can either establish a selection (marching ants) or a vector mask. I like the vector mask myself as it is only a Command Click away from generating a selection from the vector mask.

The next stage in this image was to get a "letter" style image. The font they use for the letter jackets are popular and identify the senior with their school. So it was back to the web to see if I could find that one. 

This is all I had when I started. Resizing the image to 240 dpi smoothed things out a bit but it was still back to the pen tool to get things under control. The Eagle had came from another image on their website as this one was not going to work at all. Here is the result of the work.

So how was I going to use these elements to get a pleasing result to the client. There is a little back story to this in that the seniors dad had a picture of him holding his Gibson guitar and was interested in having Tyler in the same pose with the same guitar. Here is the layer pallet for the image to follow.

Both the logos were brought in from their own files, the image of Tyler was extracted from a white background and the rest is some tweaks here and there in CS5.

The final image is a mix of these multiple images and some drop shadows and bevel and embossing to enhance the text and I ended up with a 16x20 sized image weighing in at a slender 320 MB.

Hope you enjoyed the journey... Doug