The Everglades Job

The Business:

Photographer Robert Holland does quite a bit of marine photography (something he’s quite good at) and the people at Everglades Boats in Edgewater Florida noticed so through their ad agency (Anson-Stoner out of Orlando) they contracted Robert to shoot a new line of boats for a campaign that so far includes a 58 page catalog, the Everglades Boats website, Magazine Ad’s, Billboards… etc. Robert needed help with the post production so he and the ad agency hired me for the retouching/post-production/pre-press.

The Technical:

The photos Robert took were great and hardly needed any actual “fixes”, most if not all of the work was simply “modifying” the raw image. The CD/AD on the shoot was Tom Macaluso of Anson-Stoner, he had an idea of adding a “color effect” to give the photos a “look” that would hold them together as a whole. To create the desaturated “look” or “mood” I applied countless adjustment layers and tons of masking on those layers until… well, until the image just worked. Some of the images needed over 15 different color adjustment layers while other only needed 3 or 4, that was all determined by the image’s original exposure and lighting conditions.

The other half of my job, and definitely the hardest part, was the major composite work needed to make the images to fit into a predetermined space (brochure, website…). It wasn’t as simple as cropping to the size needed for printing. If the boat worked fine in the original 11″ wide image but for the layout needed to be 27″ wide then I had to create the additional 16″ by stitching together multiple source photos of water, blending or completely replacing the sky and matching colors across the entire scene. To get this done I utilized just about every Photoshop tool I had knowledge of and even had to learn about a few new ones.

The lighter work was all finesse. When a model on one of the boats was wearing jean shorts but needed to be wearing “boat shorts” I had to find the right source image of khaki shorts, wrap them to fit over the jeans, get the colors right and make the light fall on the new shorts just as if they were in the scene. Some other work like this involved removing old motors that are no longer offered as options and replacing them with a newer make and model, raising light poles that were laid down during shooting and flipping fishing rods & reels that were positioned incorrectly in the rod holders.

The last bit of this job was the pre-press. When the catalog went to the printer there were a few issues with colors and exposures not translating correctly to the paper. Luckily I’m pretty much always on call so when the problems arose with a turn around on the adjustments needed right away I pulled my car over on a road trip and worked for over three hours at a Denny’s resturant with free WIFI, that was an experience I will never forget haha.

The Final Product:

Okay, now that you know the back story I’ll leave you with this tiny sample of the completed work. I would love to post more but there’s just too much, so here are a few of my favorites from this job. Also I threw in some examples of how the images are being used by the boat company.

did color work on this one and stretched it horizontally to fit the brochure layout.

added all the water from the front of the boat foreword.

stitched in the image of the swimmers to original boat image.

stretched this out to the left and right and replaced the sky.

this is how the images are being used on the Everglades Boats website.

a preview of the printed catalog. the spread images are 27in wide.

before & after of a banner that was printed over 6-feet tall. The red area in the “before” image is the where I added sky and water for the final. Also I swapped out the motor and the woman’s shorts.