peter wrote:
There is a web site that takes a customer’s photo, then cut out the people’s image, blacken them, add a solid color background, and draw an ipod in the image. The results looks like the ad in here:
http://www.apple.com/ipod/
I tried to do that to a photo myself, using only photoshop, and it took more than an hour. Since the commercial site charges $20, I assume it takes them less than 30 minutes to do it in order to be profitable, possibly in 15 minutes. I feel quit ashame.
I don’t think that they do it only using Photoshop as one could do it much more quickly with a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator.
Place a picture in Illustrator, trace around the outside of the image with the pen tool, fill the outline with black. This is easy and fast if you’re adept at Illustrator.
If they do this a lot, the iPod itself is probably a vector object they use over and over and rotate, skew or manipulate as needed (no need to draw it each time). The wires and headphones are easy to do quickly with the pen tool.
Save the silhouette and iPod vector art in separate files. Exit Illustrator.
Convert the original image to grayscale in Photoshop and colorize it/tint it as desired based on how one wants the parts that show through to look in the final artwork (like the jewelry in one of the pictures on Apple’s iPod page).
Paste the rasterized Illustrator-created silhouette into a layer mask, selectively edit the mask where you want parts of the image to show through (such as the jewelry). Alternately, one could just drag the silhouette art into another layer and erase parts of the artwork on that layer. This would be the trickiest part and the most time consuming but probably not if the images were high resolution and tolerant of a certain amount of sloppiness in the erasing and later reduced in size.
Open the vector iPod image in Photoshop and drag and drop it onto a new layer at the top.
Load the silhouette as a channel into the layer with the original image and invert the selection to delete the background of the original image layer. Delete the background.
Create a new layer behind the original image and fill it with the color you want as a solid color background.
The question is how to do that in a streamlined, efficient way? What software would they use to draw or add the ipod and the wires to the image?
This may not sound very streamlined but I’m guessing a person who was proficient in Illustrator and Photoshop could do this in a half hour (possibly less), particularly if they didn’t need to be perfectionists about the contours of the silhouette.
I’m curious about the place that offers the service. Can you post a link so I can see what their samples look like?
Orchid