ABSTRACT
Creating a realistic composite In a perfect world where sunsets appear on cue and clients really do read (and send) memos, you don’t need to worry about putting together a complicated production shot – it all falls magically into place. But in the real world, that rarely happens. This is an example of how the best laid plans indeed go awry and how you can use Photoshop to construct the image you need in spite of client miscommunications and weather that doesn’t play nice. In this instance, the art director promised me that he had seen the scouting shots of the Case IH dealer and it would work well as a nice dusk shot – and the building exterior even had shrubs (for some reason, he really liked those shrubs). However, the dealer did not get the memo for clearing out that particular bay of the building. The bay with the attractive shrubs had a Case IH Combine that was in about a thousand pieces. So, we were forced to shoot the big machine around the back of the building while we set up the exterior shot for dusk at the front side with the shrubs. Oh, and the sign, it seems that hadn’t been manufactured yet so I wouldn’t be able to shoot it, could I just make the sign in Photoshop? Sure… This ended up being a far more complex composite than was originally planned. Figure 7.1 shows the two original shots and the synthetic sign element created from scratch in Photoshop. The key was to shoot both the interior and exterior shots from the exact same camera angle and camera height – even taking the steps of measuring the distance and the angles to be accurate. The exterior dusk shot was done fi rst with the timing aimed to get the right dusk light. The art director had hoped for a nice sunset (yeah, like that would happen). The sunset was visually uninteresting so the art director agreed we would need to use a stock shot. I had shot a bunch of really nice sunset photos in Montana earlier in the year while on assignment for Case. While they didn’t use the sunset shot for that assignment, they did license the sunset for this one. The inside of the bay on the back side of the building was lit while waiting for the outside light to get right and shot later at night – it was a long night too!
