Making of photo composition

Last time I create some photoshop work for a poster I worked without writting down what I did. The result: I totally forgot what I did and couldn't replicate the result.

This time I won't make the same mistake.

So here's my challenge, my client gave me a bunch of JPEG files as the source of a photoshop composition being used in a poster. The problem? Most of the files are very poor in quality when using for print. Also the are all in different color tone.

So my plan was trying to "normalize them" by applying a water color filter. I also bumped up the resolution of the composition to 300 dpi so that when the filter got applied, the bitmap will look smooth on the printerd poster.

But then my client told me that all he cared was seeing those photo clear. Damn, so mcuh for doing experiment for him. Well, actually that could be a good thing for me, because the loading, saving and rendering time of applying the filter is so freaking time consuming even on my fast machine. So no filter means much faster load time. Great for me.

But I still need to resolve the color tone problem. Luckily I found a YouTube video with title "Photoshop Tip - Combining Photos & correcting color" (basically it's about using "Curve..." to add color to the photo). I followed the instruction and got some good result. However, there were some photos that I still need to twist a bit. I use Color Balance to twist the color to make it more yellow. And then I use "Brightness/Contrast" to future adjust. The result looks OK from my persepctive. I know I still need to do more exercise to get better on the whole color correction thing, but this is at least a start.

Oh, Adobe Illustrator CS3 crashed on me once today, which totally pissed me off. And it seems like I was not the only one who complain about CS3's stability problem when I serach around the Net.