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.

Using the Gradient Mesh tool in Illustrator

Most people are familiar with gradients, the smooth transition from one color to another. But the gradient mesh allows you to draw gradients along contoured paths with incredible precision! Last summer I went hiking in Colorado, along a trail known as The Crags (near Colorado Springs), because of the toothy nature of the rock spires. Along the trail I saw this beautiful wild Columbine, and used the gradient mesh in Illustrator to draw it. Voila!

Color Correction in Lightroom 5

Even the best camera with the best lighting, capturing the best moment, still needs a little work to pop! That's where post-production comes in, and my favorite program for that is Lightroom. Lightroom is the app that Photoshop used to be, before Photoshop became the "everything" program. It's streamlined for photo shoots, and does that really, really well. Here are a few examples:

Raise the temperature a bit, drop the highlights, bump up the contrast and sharpen up the edges... spot check a few skin blemishes, correct for the yellow edging from the camera calibration, add a soft vignette, and POP!

Sometimes the photo itself is not ideal. It's not following the Rule of Thirds, or there's a lot of clutter. In this case I cropped the photo to remove a lot of these distracting elements.

Increasing the vibrance and upping the tint, while dialing back the highlights really helped compensate for the fluorescent lighting, which gave everything a grayish blue washout look. Using the spot removal tool, I edited out some of the more distracting wires, helping keep the focus on the musicians.

Logo for Women's Reproductive Health Clinic in the Congo

My friend has a foundation, The Ida Lee Project, to build a women's reproductive health clinic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's a great idea, for a country with minimal healthcare infrastructure, and she's actually well on her way to making it a reality. But her website didn't yet reflect the awesomeness of her vision and dedication, so I offered to help her. This post shows how I was able to transform the poster child image of her project, into a logo that she can be proud of.

 

This is her original photo. This woman is an albino, shunned by her village, and dying from thyroid cancer. Her neck is bandaged, covering giant swollen stomas through which you can see her tendons, etc. It's very serious. As you can see, this photo is incredibly backlit, to the point where most details are just invisible. My first step was to color-correct the image in Photoshop, first with Levels to lower the mid tones, then Brightness/Contrast to drop the extremes. This left a mostly gray photo. I added Curves, to bring out colors in the shadow and high tones, and then Vibrance to bring it back to life. This is what I ended up with:

Not great, but enough to grant freedom of speech to many more of the subtle depths of angst this woman was experiencing, and recreate it as a vector image that emphasized the crucial elements.

Most obvious is her focus not on the camera, but on the frosted window. This alone speaks volumes. Second, the excessive netting, including a mosquito net, privacy curtain, and sun curtain; some things not often seen in western hospitals. Third, the medical gear, including the enormous bandage, oxygen tube, saline drip, and adjustable bed, not often seen in sub-Saharan hospitals. Fourth, the hand that has bunched up the blanket, but is too weak to grasp it tightly.

Using gradients and drop shadows as my motif, I redrew the bitmap as a vector. Now we have something to work with:

However, as is known in the logo world, Less Is More. This image, despite having some qualities with the blank face staring out the frosted window, still is too "busy", especially when sized for a business card, or really anything beyond the website. I condensed the power of the image to its most polemical essence, and this is what we ended up with as the final version:

Logo for medical courier company

This logo was made using Illustrator, and is used by a medical courier company based in Longview, Texas. While the PNG image appears to be stroked text, the original AI file was made so that each letter is a compound path, not a text line. This allows for a cleaner read by any third party vendor using an embroidery or engraving printer, and prevents the text substitution that sometimes happens when the vendor has a different version of the software than it was created in.

Sublimation Plaque

These inspirational quotes are designed for a technique called "sublimation", where the image is printed on special paper with special ink, and heat pressed at 400 degrees onto specially treated metal. The ink sublimates from a solid to a gas and permeates the metal plate. The finished plate is affixed to a wooden plaque board.

Here is the finished product.

Conference posters

 

These are color and grayscale versions of a promotional poster for an event hosted by a non-profit. Since InDesign does not have fonts for Hindi or Cyrillic, I used Illustrator to create the typography for the former, and Photoshop to import the latter.

Crystal Engraving

One of many laser engraved awards using the Epilogue 5000 laser printer. This award is crystal on a granite base. Shown with the paper proof behind the crystal for illustration purposes.