09.04.08

Alternative Process Digital Imagery

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N.W. MI State Fair 06'

The carnival series started when I had an image I liked, but the exposure was all wrong. I decided to experiment with it. I did most of the work in PhotoShop. I had to bring up the exposure values, but that left me with an image that was full of noise. Noise won’t sell in the stock galleries.

I went back over the image with PS tools— smoothing things out, bringing out colors, even drawing in missing details, and eliminating any ‘white gaps’ caused by the AutoTrace. I chopped parts out, traced them separately, tweeked values, redrew faces— all kinds of stuff, but all in PS. Then I saved them at 300 dpi and imported them to Adobe Illustrator.

Vectorized Version

In AI (Adobe Illustrator) I messed with the auto-trace trying to get the most with the least amount of resolution and colors. I learned to layer compositions in PS and then import them to AI. That way I could have higher resolution on important details and less on backgrounds, or where I could get away with less— to reduce file size. I still ended up with giant file sizes.

Then I discovered if I re-saved the AIs as PS (PhotoShop) rastors, then re-auto traced the rastors in AI, the file sizes were dramatically reduced without losing the image I created.

Pretty crazy work flow! Eh? But I ended up with a product I like. Some of the layers are partially traced, some are nearly all redrawn, but nearly all of the work is in PS.