Building the Mega Super-8 Strike Team |
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Building the Mega Super-8 Strike Team |
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The Super Mega 8 Strike Team is this stupid concept I came up with for my Myspace Top 8. This is when they first introduced the whole concept of the Top 8 and everyone was in a tizzy about who they should put in their Top 8 and all that. Mostly, it seemed like people were overly concerned with whether or not they were making into other users' Top 8 lists. I would get messages stating things like "I put you in my Top 8, but it's okay if you don't put me in yours," which, I guess, pretty much means that if I didn't put them in my Top 8, I should feel guilty. But I didn't and I didn't. There was many a bulletin about the social awkwardness that the whole concept of the "Top 8" was creating. People were actually getting mad over being excluded from this elite list of 8 friends who are apparently better than all the rest. So, I decided to really make the point that those in my Top 8 are not only better than the rest of my friends, but better than everyone else's friends. So, I came up with the idea that I would make them all look like they were stars in some primetime tv show. It's not supposed to be serious. It's not even done that well. It was fun to do, though, and everyone got a kick out of it.
Some of the Team were photographed in their poses(Paul, Sarah, Rachel, Matt), one simply posed for a headshot(Jerry), and the rest were photoshop manipulations from older photos I had on hand. The last group I did first, since I didn't even have to leave my computer to do them. The toughest thing was finding good bodies for the heads I had. I'll show how I handled one of those images on the next page, but first, let me just show how I dealt with one of the posed shots.
 First off, let me just state that everything we're doing will be done in Photoshop CS2. This is not so much a tutorial as it is just an explanation of what went into creating this whole silly thing- and it is meant to be silly, just so you know. I don't actually think my friends are in a strike team or that they should be. Certainly, there are a few here that I wouldn't trust with a gun or even a knife. Anyway, I started with a photo I took of Rachel outside the club, in Philly. The lighting conditions were pretty dismal, so the results were less than I had hoped for. It's actually a pretty cruddy, slightly blurry hot. |
 I don't even remember why, but I started off by flipping the whole image horizontally. |
 There was some slight movement in Rachel's hand when the picture was taken, so the gun came out blurry. |
 Fortunately, I took a lot of bad photos that night, and this one had a clearer shot of the gun. I clipped the hands off of this one and placed it on the Rachel I was using. |
  Using a layer mask, I seperated Rachel from the background, adding touchups to the hair, which was frizzy around the edges and impossible to properly mask out. A detail of the painted in hair can be seen on the right. Doesn't look so hot in close up, but it would do fine for what I was using it for. | |
 For Rachel's background image, I surfed google.image and blatantly stole this photo of Shibuya, Japan from someone's webpage. Oh well. I wanted a clear separation between the subjects and the backgrounds, so I made them black and white. Just turning and image b&w through greyscale usually yields some pretty bland results, so I used the Channel Mixer. Image> Adjustments> Channel Mixer.... Check the Monochrome checkbox and set the Red Source Channel to +50 and the Green Source Channel to +60. Play with it til you get a nice, brilliant b&w image. If you want to, for some reason, retain your color image, you can create a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer with the same settings. |
 After that, it was just a simple matter of placing Rachel and the background image into the layout format I had chosen, and then smoothing things out. The first Strike Team poster I did was the one with me, since, obviously, I was the one most available for posing- and God, does it feel stupid to pose in these shots. When laying that one out, with the black fades at the top and bottom, the text, and the Strike Team Top 8 position emblem, I created a template which I simply kept and used to plug in the other photos when creating everyone else's. |
 Here is the finished image, without the text. | |
The Bleach Bypass is an effect that you've seen in movies like Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report. Rather than try to explain the effect, I will give you the LINK to the page where I downloaded the Photoshop filter(only for PCs)- and rather than expect you to go there and read it, I will simply plagiarize their description and display it here: "The bleach bypass, or "bleach skip" technique involves the partial or complete skipping of the bleaching stage during the processing of a colour film. This prevents the silver from being removed from the negative, and the result is a contrasty image with muted colours." Neat, eh? Here is what the effect looks like. Roll your cursor over the image to see the following image with the Bleach Bypass applied:
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