The DC10 "Glamour" ad has been chosen as the winner of iStockPhoto's Punctum Day "Design of the Year"! It's quite the honor, seeing as iStock is the largest professional stock image site in the world, and the judges who selected my piece as winner included none other than Scott Kelby (editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Layers magazine, President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), and world's 1 best-selling author of all computer and technology books, across all categories), Jeff Howe (contributing editor at Wired Magazine), and John Rees (a "living icon in the world of photography", shooting for Apple, Nike, Starbucks, and MGM).

Ok enough bragging, here is a very basic deconstruction of the ad. Aside from the type elements, this image was produced entirely in photoshop.



The image was constructed out of three main photographs: I photographed the model against a blank background, much like the "green screen" technique. The jet and the runway photos were purchased at iStock.

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The most challenging part of this project was finding the right images to work with. Ideally, one would approach a composition like this by ensuring images are all shot from the same perspective with the same lens in similar lighting conditions. I didn't do that. In truth I completely lucked out to find stock images that worked at all, and even still this is not a perfect representation of perspective. But you work with the materials (and budget!) you can get.

One particular detail that the client wanted to see happen was that the luggage match the model's outfit, and to feature a pattern consisting of his club's logo. To do this, I needed to completely replace the vinyl material of the luggage with a new material. A cross-hatched weave pattern seemed to give the impression of a material similar to that of the real luggage, and I had a scan of canvas paper on hand which had this pattern. After isolating the areas of the luggage that needed replacing, some simple manipulating and color treatment to the canvas gave the impression of shadows, highlights, and shine. The final touch needed to fully integrate the new luggage into the enviroment was a simple issue of color and a cast-shadow. Colors reflect on each other, especially in intense light. In this case the underside of the plane and the luggage needed to reflect the color of the pavement below it.



Continuing these themes of matching light and shadow, especially strong highlights and cast-shadows in this case, will ultimately help tie the separate elements together to create a cohesive whole. One way to ensure that the elements don't seem out of place is to increase the contrast of the whole image a bit, exaggerating blacks and whites to give the image a "contrasty" feel. While this stylizes the image it helps to bind everything together.

Hope this was useful to you photoshop gurus out there.