Rice University Intramural Sports marketing, part 3

This is the third and final part of a three-part series on the Intramural Sports marketing for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Part 3: The Final Product

We began this series with The Idea, before moving to The Execution: The raw product, the unedited photos, and the three poses we had to choose from. Here, we’ll explore the process that gets us to our final product.

So looking at the original image, I knew where we wanted to go with the shot: I wanted to make a tree line behind them, make some ominous clouds, and get rid of the extra distracting buildings. Later on, throw in some high contrast, and we’ll get a pretty sweet image at the end.

Here are the images we’re going to use. I took a picture of a tree line at Rice last year, and I went back and found it. We’ll use it for this shot:

I found this shot of clouds behind a mountain that we’ll throw behind the All Stars for the final product as well:

We’re going to get into those later. But first, a note: This is not designed to be a tutorial, per se; if it were, the steps would be a lot more detailed. Rather, it’s just intended to give an idea of the process behind creating the final product from the photos we had. Remember: This whole process started with an idea. If you know what you want before you begin the process, they whole thing will be much easier on you.

The first step was to get the players selected. No matter what, I knew they were going to be in the front, so I wanted two things:

1. A saved selection of them that I could always go back to, and
2. Utilizing that selection, cut and paste them on their own layer, void of any background, so they could be edited independently of the other picture elements.

With these two, I can modify the background and the All Stars’ surroundings without ever bothering the people. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to enter into Quick Mask mode (hit ‘Q’ on your keyboard with Photoshop open and the original layer selected), choose black as your foreground color and white as your background color, and start painting over the people in the image. I chose to use a large brush for all the major areas, and then went back in with a small brush to get the nit-picky regions.

This is what I selected without zooming in on the picture, trying to get the major areas covered:

Then, when we zoom in, we can start selecting and painting over smaller regions:

After a painstakingly perfectionist process, here is the final mask (click thumbnail for full version):

At this point, hit Q again to exit quick mask mode, and your “marching ants” show up around the picture. Currently, though, the inverse portion is selected. Hit Ctrl+Shift+I to invert your selection so you have the people selected, not the background. To save this selection, go to Select > Save Selection. Give it a name and save that bad boy. Now you can Load the selection at any point you’d like.

Now, press Ctrl+C to copy the All Stars, and press Ctrl+V to paste them onto a separate layer, all by themselves. We can now edit the background and not worry about screwing up our peeps.

At this point, we need to bring in the tree line and the clouds to fill out the image. (The clouds in the tree line photo aren’t dynamic enough.) Remember those pictures from the top of this entry? This is where they come in. To make a LONG story short, we’re going to cut out the tree line, place it behind the people so the buildings (”distractions”) disappear. I’m going to use the Lasso Tool with a feather of 30px on it. Place your cloud photo on a layer above your original, but behind the people. Then, place your tree line photo on top of the cloud layer, but still behind the people.

Here’s a picture of the selection I made in order to get rid of the extra clouds, and then preserve the tree line (you can already see that with the photo in there, the distracting buildings have already been removed):

When you delete them, the dynamic clouds will show through. At this point, we have a pretty solid “picture”. But to make it the utmost dynamic, we’re going to edit the levels and curves of the picture so that it looks bright, with more contrast, providing an all around better shot that we couldn’t get in the field with the lighting conditions.

Now, I like the really high contrast look for sports/athletic pictures; it’s like in the movie “300″. This technique is called HDR (High Dynamic Range), and the scope of creating this effect is covered in detail on other places on the Internet, so I won’t bother with it here. However, Tutorial Log has a good round-up of tutorials and examples. There’s one problem, though: When we took the shots, we didn’t take multiple shots of the same thing in different exposures, the way to make an “official” HDR image. I’m not a photographer, nor do I claim to be. This just means we’re going to try to replicate the technique using the current photos we have.

A good trick from PSDTuts: Copy just the cloud layer and paste it in front of the original cloud layer. Set the blend mode to “Lighter Color”. Copy the original cloud layer again and move it above BOTH cloud layers. This time, set the blend mode to “Multiply”. You’ll already start to see a difference in the contrast and clouds. Sorry for the lack of pictures at this point!

Here is the most important part: Get out your burn and dodge tool to make the whites and light colors bright as crap, and then dodge the dark ones to make them seep. This is an entirely arbitrary process; it can go until you’re satisfied. When using the burn tool, only burn the shadows. When using the dodge tool, only dodge the highlights.

At this point it’s been too long without a photo. Good thing! Because after your burn and dodge your life away, you can come up to your final shot. For the record, this wasn’t/probably won’t be a short process. Burning and dodging on different layers, utilizing the blending modes to aide in your editing, it can take hours before you get to something you’re comfortable with. I also moved around some trees and messed with the clouds a bit. Anyway, after all that, we have our final shot (mouse over it to see the original):

Looks pretty sick. Now, all we have to do is design around it so the campaign takes shape. Just a photo isn’t going to cut it! I’ll post the final marketing poster when it’s done, but as far as editing for a base image is concerned, we’ve got a great starting point for a great campaign.