Changing the color of a blazer

This client needed to change the color of her blazer from navy blue, to red.

Click the photo to see a larger version of the before and after.

I also tightened up the levels on the photo, to remove some of the mid tone greys, which adds a little more life and color to her face.

Image Editing

A client needed to take a photo and edit out all the extraneous background clutter so it would emphasize what she wanted.

She wanted specifically to edit out the woman behind her arm, the man on the left, the fire alarm behind her head, the thermostat behind her signs, and she wanted to remove the glare from the lights on her signs. She also wanted the photo cropped closer.

Click on the image to see a larger version of the before and after.

In addition to these things, I also used the Rule of Thirds to crop the photo so her face intersected the upper horizontal and left vertical.

Funeral Program

My father in law and stepmother in law drowned in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. I made the funeral program for them, and am including here samples from that brochure. It was made so the pages were offset 3/4" from each other, which generated a tabbed look, allowing the reader to flip to different sections of the program easily. I am not including all the personal tributes and family photos in this post.

Here is the front outside cover:

 Here is the inside front cover:

 Page showing the order of service (with tabbed header on the right side):

 Outside back cover:

Concert Poster

This concert poster was made combining Illustrator vectors with a fade for the background, with the text and photos in the foreground. It is a simple example of an easy to make poster that gets the point across.

Front Cover for Print Catalog

This is the front cover of a 50 page catalog. This was a fun project, because I built the knife featured on the cover, as well as photograph it in the various stages of its production.

If you do an image search for "knife catalog" you'll find most covers feature anywhere from one to twenty knives in some kind of outdoorsy setting. After a while, all these covers start to look the same. Recognizing the need for new ideas, I based the inspiration for this cover on the name of the company, and illuminated the process from raw materials to finished product. The entire page communicates the single idea all at once, but does so in a way that progresses from the top to the bottom.

By using the same materials in different stages of completion requires setting benchmark standards for color correction, since subtle changes of position effects lighting reflects on the CCD of the camera differently.

Below are some of the spreads from the catalog. You can see the full (large) file here: https://www.texasknife.com/catalog/catalog.pdf

 

Color correcting the Boone & Crockett knife

The Boone & Crockett knife is made from the burlwood of California Buckeye, which grows along the Sacramento River valley, up through the redwood forests of northern California. The pins are aluminum, which complements the mirror polished finish to the blade. The sheath is dyed, full grain, tooling grade cow leather.

Photographing highly reflective objects like mirrors and buffed wood requires some definite attention to detail. The blade was nearly pure white in the original photo, so I selected the blade and added a masked gradient fill in the direction of the edge. The background was made white with Levels, which red-shifted the colors, including the shadow. Making the shadow greyscale was easy enough, by selecting it and adding the B/W filter, and the rest of the knife was color corrected with a Hue/Saturation filter.

A finished knife like this sells for $90. The published illustration is here: http://www.texasknife.com/vcom/product_info.php?products_id=809

In Memoriam: Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson

I met Civil Rights heroine Amelia Robinson in 2006, at a speech in Los Angeles. She recently died, at the amazing age of 110! Using the image from when we met, I create a new image that included her historic walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday", and the text of a quatrain she wrote in her book "Bridge Across Jordan", which was then sublimated on metal and made into a commemorative plaque.