Location: Evansville, Indiana
www.designhappens.com
www.twitter.com/matthewbarrett
This method is supposed to provide a quick and effective way to isolate translucent products on a white background. No, I don't work for Coca-Cola. Yes, I still found myself editing this for my job. Since I started using this method, I have used it for other product photography and it seems to work great and takes less than 20 minutes after a few attempts.
The major problem with shooting this type of product is that with the frosty, smoky, see-through, translucent material, light doesn't fully reflect or penetrate the product. It causes all sorts of funky issues with the highlights and shadows.. at least in my experience. The only good thing is that there are no glares.
So to start, I got rid of most of the background by using the pen tool and tracing the outside edge and creating a vector mask on the image layer. When adding a white background below this layer, you should see that the cup looks gray now. Well crap, thats not going to go over well... Lets just fill the cup with something and reshoot the picture. I thought about it, but they wanted an empty shot so I'll keep going.
Its time to brighten this cup up a little bit without washing out all the detail. This can make or break this technique. If too much is added, it will look overly edited and look like total garbage. On a new layer, I used a medium sized brush at 50% opacity and painted over the whole thing. I did this to get an even level of brightness over the total cup. It doesn't have to be precise since we are using a vector mask.
On this same layer, add a layer mask and use a black brush to fade out the sides and bottom of the cup.
I added a little more white to the middle and top-back edge and traced out the logos on the front of the cup and erased all white on the other layers so it would show through as the original image.
A slight shadow to the bottom for some weight and that's that.
I was looking for a way to introduce a few of my friends' blogs on this blog. I wanted to make it a little more personal but I didn't want to include a normal photo of them, so I decided to illustrate a logo/icon of their face and link to their blogs. You can see the examples in the sidebar and below is the final version of myself on the left and Nicholas Patten on the right.
The process is rather simple, but in its simplicity, it was difficult to make look polished. A few versions looked like I half-assed it with the lasso tool and some looked like I applied the basic cutout filter in Photoshop.
The process was to first find a good picture. I was looking for images at an iso or 3/4 view. Lighting at this angle can be easy to guess and can offer a lot of depth to an image. Transferring that depth to a flat illustration is pretty hard if the photo was taken straight on.
I was coming up with a few backgrounds for this site and I thought I'd let everyone download them for anything they want. I tried to make them clean and subtle so the content will still be the focus, yet will still add a little style to the page.
We had a cookout and the neighbors drove this down. Kind of an odd mashup of cadillac rims, shortened beetle kit and cartoon decals. The kit probably cut out 2 feet or more from the middle of the car. My dad and I just stared at it for about 10 minutes.
I saw this in an email and I'm not sure who this belongs to or who this was shot by, but it was too good to pass up. Skip to :35 if you dont want to watch the whole thing.
This is a recap of the engine I rebuilt from july '08 to june '09. The engine was given to me as a parts engine when I bought my other dune buggy in 2006. It obviously wasn't worth crap so the engine sat in the back of a garage for 2 years before I had time to look at it. I never got around to posting about it, but here's the summary including disassembly, cleaning, painting, reassmbly, and installation. i have about 50 other images I can post if anyone is interested.
That's my friend Mark in the last pic being an idiot.
Well time for another update. I was going to put the head back on, but then after looking at the lifters and all the crap that was down in there, I thought it would be a good idea to take them out and clean out any blockage. In between all the lifter bores, there was a huge amount of oil sludge built up and really needed to be removed. Its a tight fit for most tools but luckily, the sludge was sticky enough to scrap with a long screwdriver and remove.
With the car not being started in 10 years, there was not much oil around the lifters. Combine this and not having the correct tool to do the job, it was a little difficult. My dad stopped by for something unrelated, but got to talking about the gremlin. First attempt was to get a strong stick magnet and pull them out but all the crap around them was preventing them from sliding out all the way. The second attempt was to use the metal tab on the end of a tape measure and a pencil to push it in the retainer notch, pulling them out with the tape measure. Redneck engineering at its best, but hey... it worked for 2 of them. We moved on to better methods when my dad made this tool for me. Fairly simple, lathe work on a steel rod and it worked beautifully.
Removing the lockring at the top allows to remove the plunger and get all these little parts out. Some were froze up but after a little time they finally came loose. Disassembly took maybe 2 hours and after some cleanup and reassmbly, I'll have about 4 hours into it.
My biggest concern was that the oil inlets were blocked and not allowing oil to pass into the tappet body. If this is blocked, the hydraulic aspect of the lifter is not working and will keep a gap at the rockers meaning a clicky engine while its running. You can see the two oil inlet holes in the pic below. They are in the small notch on the plunger and one on the tappet body.
My build is nothing compared to this, but I can dream right? I can't imagine the torque this thing is putting out. Gremlins were not known to handle that great so its probably a good thing this is only on the drag strip. The audio is pretty loud and terrible so watch the volume.
