Last night I ran into an old friend/client that feel out of touch. It’s part of life, but this stirred up some old memories. Jorge (my friend and editor of about a million magazines, scaling from local to international) was always fun to work with, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have our share of hard times. I had to laugh remembering what it was like working with him and the publisher, Alex. After every photo shoot, Alex and Jorge would spend hours going through images to find a favorite. Not uncommonly they would disagree on which photograph to use. Alex, undoubtedly would love the face of one shot and Jorge would love the pose of another, hence “Frankenphoto” was born. In order to move forward, often I would find myself compiling many parts of an image into one final shot. One particular photo was the poster child for “Frankephoto”, the first cover shoot for “The Most Beautiful People” issue of Key Biscayne Magazine. What happened, (and Alex & Jorge, correct me if I get any of this wrong as it has been years..) we shot certain images expecting them to be placed in particular parts of the article, but go figure, the cover they decided they really wanted was not the cover we shot. So I began one of the largest Photoshop marathons of my life. Today, this would take me almost no time, Photoshop has come a long way as have my skills, but if I remember right, there were phone calls, arguments, Star Trek (don’t ask) and eventually 26 hours of retouching madness to create the iconic cover. In the end, I felt more bonded with the boys. We all together created something great, without their ideas of what it could be and motivation to go for it (“Never say it’s impossible!”) we wouldn’t have had it. I still think about this cover, something so beyond what I knew how to do, and use it to remind myself that even when I don’t know how to do something, I can find a way. So Alex and Jorge, this post is dedicated to you. So to start, the boys picked 5 images they loved and wanted composited together for the cover, rollover the image to see the before and after’s of each picture: (*sorry, have to throw in this disclaimer: please remember, all these people are truly beautiful before retouching, however today if I were retouching -this was 2008, I would be more conservative in my work, for example, I wouldn’t worry about waistlines as much)
Before
After
and the final version of it all put together of course!
Not going to lie, being able to see the before and afters of my retouching work is one of my guilty pleasures and now you can see it too! Love it!