Image Editing & Photoshop Design

I’ve used Photoshop on a lot of different projects at companies I’ve worked for. I’ve used it for editing photographs, created graphic designs like the Long View Cloud Road Map, and even for colouring comic book pages! I wanted to use a recent image I created as a sample that’s not from a corporate setting but rather from me advertising my own traditional artwork as this is something I created very recently and has a story to it that shows my work process.

On the sample here I’m showcasing a painting I made for an MLB trading card set. The process started with taking a high res scan of the painting and then editing it in photoshop by colour correcting the image and boosting the blacks as these are often washed out in my scanner. I then created a Photoshop page that was sized for use on Instagram and Facebook; I could make other size variations for other platforms but for my own needs here I find it’s better to not spend time making other variations.

For the image I considered a few things that I want to get across. First is to have my artwork front and center but not too big. I also want my imagery to be standardized on all the cards, so I created a mask that is applied to each scan when imported into a unique folder in the PS file. Secondly is to have my and the company’s I work for branding to be noticeable, so I place that in the top left. Below the logos is the product name and info on the image itself which is of third importance. Text isn’t frequently needed on social media posts as most people won’t read it but in this case I think it works. Lastly, in smaller text is the words ‘like, follow, comment, share’. This is a little difficult to read but I’m OK with this as it’s a slogan I’ve used elsewhere and people who follow me are familiar with it.

For the background I wanted something bright, clean, and related to the subject matter -baseball. For the top two-thirds I used layers of a wood grain stock image with a slight blur effect and a white colour layer overtop with semi-opacity. This layer fades at the bottom to reveal two combined images: a baseball sitting in grass and a grass field. I had masked out the background on the baseball and placed a grass field behind it and then added some semi-transparent layers where I used the paint brush to add shadows and highlights. The text on the ball was first made as text then turned into an object that was warped around the ball and the blending mode was changed to Multiply.