It’s been years since I decided to pull back the curtain a little bit and let you see what goes into making some of the images you see here on my blog. I decided to do this today simply because I’ve posted a few images recently that are perfect examples of the kind of work that goes unnoticed (hopefully) but can sometimes take hours to compose and composite. So without further blabbering from me, let’s jump right into the first image.

A few blog posts ago I posted Angel & The Fretz’s engagement session where we pulled off our take on the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World imagery… The Most Interesting Groom in the World…

A number of you didn’t catch on immediately that both of the girls in the shot above are, in fact, Angel: Black Angel and Turquoise Angel. And that my friends, is what this post is all about.

Once I decided on a pose, we grabbed the first shot. I originally intended this to be a landscape shot, hence the angle of view, and I also needed to give myself a little room to crop and move things around so I shot a little wider than I needed to.

RAW Shot #1

While Angel ran off to change, I told Fretz to just sit still and chill… and when she returned we captured the second image.

RAW Shot #2

Now the astute among you will notice that the bottle in his hand above is a Bud, not a Dos Equis. Who would have thunk that there wasn’t a Dos Equis in sight at the 5 Paces? The bar staff searched high and low and eventually went out to find a Dos Equis for us. They actually LEFT to go and find one for us! How cool is that?!

So they returned with the right brew and I grabbed a third shot solely for the purpose of swapping out the beer bottle later.

RAW Shot #3

This is where the fun begins… I needed to decide which Fretz I wanted to keep. I chose the Fretz from RAW Shot #1 above which meant the only thing I need from RAW Shot#2 below is Turquoise Angel, and here she is.

Then I layered RAW Shot #2 above it…

… and proceeded to “paint in” the Turquoise Angel using a layer mask to “reveal” the layer below it (i.e. the Turquoise Angel). Here is what the mask looks like when it is complete.

Now it was time to deal with the beer bottle. The first thing I did was take the Dos Equis bottle and match the size and angle to the master shot. Here is a shot of the [rather sloppily cut out] bottle side by side with the first bottle so you can see where it’s going to be placed.

And here it is in place. Keep in mind that we are zoomed in over 200% so the artifacting and edges you see (a) will not show up at normal size and (b) are exaggerated by the sharpening that is part of my blog posting process.

By far, the hardest part of this image was getting the beer bottle to NOT look like it was floating out there in space. One thing that I know from old Mickey Mouse bits was that one of the primary visual clues the brain uses to determine spacial placement is the presence of shadows. So the answer was adding a near-black shadow right below and to the left of the bottle.

So I put it all together, add a little more photoshop magic to give it the overall emotion and feel I want, and we have…

If you have any comments or questions, please let me know in the comments below!