I wanted to do a simple project that would bridge me over until Easter break, so I decided to try to do something in the style of Apple’s iPod ads. I got a picture of my aunt dancing from a family party last year, which wasn’t exactly ideal because she wasn’t against a solid background...
Apple’s newer ads have jewelry on the people in a kind of shadowy way so that it shows up sort of like the background color. It took me a long time to figure out how to change grayscale to go from white to black to pink to black, but I eventually found the gradient map tool under Image -> Adjustments, and that did exactly what I wanted.
I drew the iPod itself with a combination of brush tools for rounded corners, selection filling for the solid body part, and the rounded rectangle and ellipse shape tools for the screen and scroll wheel. Then I just transformed it smaller and into the position I wanted.
The hand in the original picture wasn’t in a position where it would have been holding anything. I cut out the end of the hand and used the brush tool to draw in some fingers. They’re not great, but they look fairly realistic. I’d say the main problem with them is they aren’t very feminine so they look out of place. I was surprised how well they came out; normally I can’t draw well at all.
The hard part wound up being how to draw the cord for the headphones. The brush tool on one pixel didn’t repeat fast enough, so I’d have a dotted line instead of a solid one. I tried playing with the pen tool, but I couldn’t get it to draw a line instead of a shape. The pencil tool exhibited different behavior than the brush, so when I used that it drew a solid line. Once I drew the cord I put a .2px Gaussian blur on it to make it seem less jagged.
One of the things the real Apple ads have going for them is they have much better anti-aliasing than I do; everything is really smooth. They probably work with better source than I do too. It would have been easier to have a model with an actual iPod against a green screen to edit than a relatively dark picture of someone dancing. I did use the actual font Apple uses, which is Myriad. Overall, it was a pretty good project to fill some extra time.
back...