A peek into my day job.

Not that it's super impressive or anything, but I thought I'd share a few things that have come across my desk recently at work. Below are stock photography images that I've had to alter to varying degrees. These are the types of things that tend to take up a lot of my day (sometimes days) when they pop up. Retouching photos used to really intimidate me, but a couple years ago, I got thrown into it and learned some tricks from a former co-worker who was probably expert level. Now, I don't claim to be at his Photoshop skill level, but I'm getting more comfortable with it and don't panic when I send out final artwork anymore.

The blond lady was missing the side and top of her hair and her left shoulder. The brunette was missing the top and some of the right side of her hair. Not too bad as far as retouching goes, but hair can be a little tricky to work around. I added hair to both, dropped out the background and adjusted the color a little bit, just to make them look a little less flat. They have a little rosy glow now.

For this image the art director made lots of changes. A couple of which I initially overlooked and had to go back and adjust more once I realized. Sometimes they forget to tell me everything they'd like for me to do to the photos! Anyway, the obvious change was the removal of the prescription bottles. Then the blurry cotton swab jar in front of her right shoulder had to go too. This pretty much came down to recreating the front of her lab coat. That was interesting. There just wasn't much to work with there. After that, I had to nix the IV bag and rack and replace the background because the image wasn't quite wide enough for the project. I think I ended up adding a smidge to the beakers and laptop as well. 

This one was involved! It wasn't really a problem to get rid of the little floating platform. Unfortunately this image was way too skinny for the art director's vision. I had to make up the deck and the arm of the chair on the left and add a bit to the right side as well. There's not much to say about it, other than it took me a while to get it to where you might not notice if it weren't pointed out to you. Water generally has a nice ripple to it, but you have to be careful not to have it look too much like a pattern. At least I got to look at a cute cat for a while. :)

So that sort of stuff is probably the most challenging part of my day job. Not too bad for a day's work, although I spend a lot of time with jewelry design in the back of my mind...