Top Gear Series 18 Micro-site Retouching
on Apr 13 in Retouching, Web Design tagged Creative Retouch, Photoshop, web
R&B Creative recently built the fantastic Top Gear series 18 website and I had the pleasure of retouching together the four hero scenes. A special mention goes out to Mark (Art Director) and Adam (Designer) for leaving me with lovely Photoshop files to work with.
Stepping through the following images I’ll give you a peek into what goes into a composition like this.
Rough background composition
The first step is bringing together all the various background elements and merging them all together. This background is made up of about 5 images.
Finalise the background with a cracked edge feature
Next the broken away front edge was added. In the finished site it made for a transition from imagery to content.
Add a car
Top Gear wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for fast cars, so naturally the next element to add is the hero car.
Make the car part of the composition
Here I took the clipped out still life image of the car and added motion to the wheels, a dash of smoke to the rear tires, and grounding shadow. Grounding shadows really help when you are trying to avoid the ‘primary school scrap book’ look.
The car will look faster if the Stig is inside
Of course we needed the Stig onboard… I mean, it’ll look a little silly to have a ‘moving’ car with no driver.
Masking the Stig
Some careful masking resulted in the Stig sitting nicely in position, but let still requiring some work to sell the composition.
And it’s done!
After a great deal of colour correction and various lighting enhancements to the Stig and that remained was to add a Top Gear licence plate and the retouch was complete.
If you haven’t checked out the Top Gear Series 18 website yet, head over there now… (If you connect to the interwebs with dial-up you might as well make a nice cup of tea and consider the benefits of a high-speed internet connection while you wait for the site to load.)
Duatravel.com design
on Feb 16 in Web Design tagged Photoshop, UI Design, web
Down Under Answers required a new look to their successful website and they wanted to get the ball rolling with a certain section of the site that is dedicated to offering the best Carrier deals from the USA to Australasia and the Pacific Islands.
With their coder/webmaster ready and waiting in Seattle it was up to me produce a clean, user friendly layout.
Click here to see the live Air New Zealand themed page at Down Under Answers.
Brand channels on Guvera
on Feb 09 in Web Design tagged Agency, Illustrator, Photoshop, webThe good people at Cocojambo call on me from time to time to create brand channels for Guvera.com, the excellent free music website. This is a selection of working and concept channels I have produced recently.
