Portland Macintosh Users Group

I do graphic design and Photoshop work for a living, specializing in offering retouching, special effects and pre-press services to commercial photography studios and their clients. I've collaborated with Polara Studios on a number of occasions, and they graciously allowed me to use their digital photo of these sunglasses for my most recent self promotional mailer. As you can see the retouching was extensive, especially the distortion of the shadow to make it large enough to accept the palm tree photo at a sufficient size to be recognizable. The silhouette of the palm tree is one of the royalty free stock photos that came on the Photoshop 7 upgrade disc. The concept was entirely mine.

The typeface used was Brush, typical of cheesy vacation postcards. The type treatment used only one third party filter: NikType's Water Medium which gave me a black and white starting point. The rest was done with standard Photoshop filters, channel operations and layer blending effects.

Creating the image and type was much too involved and complex for me to write up, but if anyone is REALLY interested they can call me (503.238.9637) or email me (gtwain@twainphotographics.com) and we can arrange for them to see my layered files.

I have a URL, twainphotographics.com, but it isn't a real web site yet. One of these days I'll have an extensive portfolio posted there. I offered the image to PMUG for a color cover on Mouse Tracks since it doesn't translate to black and white very well. Since there aren't going to be any more color covers, placement of the image here on PMUG.org was offered to me as an alternative.