Ides of March
Man after seeing the other posts for this week, I knew I was going to have to work hard!! Like Phil, I also I followed Jason’s lead and went with a movie poster. While scanning Netflix and iTunes for ideas I came across the Ides of March. Here’s the actual poster.
I liked the dual images of the faces in the poster and remembered a photo of Phil that I could use for the face in the TIME magazine (refer to his post It’s All in the Eyes ). Hope Phil doesn’t mind me using it. Because it was a partial shot of his face, I couldn’t replicate the poster 100% – I even had to add a bit more forehead. I had to hold the magazine a little lower on may face. So although it’s not a perfect split on two faces, I’m still pretty happy with it.
I’m proud to say that the magazine in my hand is 100% created in Photoshop. First I took a self portrait where I held a magazine with white paper taped to the front (figured it’d be easier to replace with my own image).
Then in photoshop I isolated the white from the paper, deleted it so that there was a transparent hole, and build the magazine in underneath (more or less, there was some overlapping – like in the curve of the magazine at the top).
I had to put Phil in a suit, so I first took a picture of myself wearing one, isolated and added it to Phil’s picture (after cropping and rotating). Here’s the progression below:
Command+T was extremely useful this week – it enables you to rotate and resize an individual layer as opposed to the entire file. That was a new discovery for me.
I removed the original background behind Phil, and tried to recreate the red & white stripes from the original movie poster. Then I took the TIME logo from the internet, isolated the letters and tried to tilt them so that they look more believable with a folded magazine. Then it was a series of Curve layers to get the shadows and glares you’d see on glossy paper. Also, to add the shadows underneath my fingers and on my face under the magazine.
I then took a brick texture from online and replaced my living room window with it. It was originally red & white, but I changed it to blue & white so it would be easier to crop out around my hair – ie: i wouldn’t have to cut out the minute holes since the colours where so close.
Then I added some noise to hide the fact that my self portrait was not as well focused as Phil’s!!
Finally, the last bit of processing before the black sides and lettering was a technique to get a look similar to the “Jill Greenburg” effect. Here’s a video tutorial that shows a bit of her work, and how to get the look (there’s some extensive lighting setup as well, not covered in this video but easy to search).
