I recently posted a tutorial on the creation of one of my Tarot card images – The Magician. This is an elaborate composition of multiple photo images with graphic elements, filter effects, and painting effects, very clearly a photo-illustration! I want to broaden the definition of photo-illustration a bit here, to give you a better idea of the kinds of things I teach in my workshops about the subject. For me, photo-illustration is any photo-image which has been enhanced beyond what the camera captured, and beyond what the photographer remembered about the scene, to create something new, rather than represent something in the real world.
I explore some simple photo-illustration projects in my Photoshop Layers Fundamentals class at the Bryan Peterson School of Photography online—click the link above for details about the class.
The term photo-illustration has a slightly more specific meaning in the world of commercial photography—here it means any photo that is designed to tell a story or illustrate a concept—much advertising photography would come under that category. Broadly speaking, photo-illustration can be of any subject, though quite often in advertising, it is product oriented as in this image I created for an ice-cream product:
A package shot that creates an appealing environment to communicate “frosty goodness”
Or this image I did for a small speaker system manufacturer – the name of the company is Blue Sky Speakers:
This was composed of 5 separate shots – 3 for the speakers, 2 more for the sky and sand. Everything was assembled in Photoshop. The speakers were originally shot on white seamless!
Sometimes an advertising image can be more purely conceptual. I did the following image for a large commercial photo lab and printing firm – it was designed to advertise their scanning service when they started offering Photo-CD scans, and it appeared as the cover of their price-list/brochure:
Assembled from original photographs of a Photo CD, clouds, a circuit board, and a frame of Ektachrome film. The beam of light was painted in and the ground was created by a KPT texture filter.
I have created many conceptual images for stock use, including the following examples:
Cowboy Night
Wonder Boys
Education
Photo-illustration can also be less specifically conceptual, and more abstract – perhaps more oriented to fine art application, like the following:
Temporal Displacement
Belly Dance
Photo-illustration can also have a fashion aspect, as in the following:
Jamie Rocks!
Splash Girl
Music offers a ripe subject for photo-illustration when one tries to get the viewer to “hear” the music when “seeing” the picture! I did the following image for an African dance group – they used the image for promotional posters, with a space left for inserting dates and locations…
Abalaye Dance Group
Probably the biggest category of images within photo-illustration is the movie poster – I have done many movie posters over the years, but I cannot always show this work because, most of the time, I do not own the rights to these images. This is one of the disadvantages to working for the big movie studios. I will show some of the minor “B” movie images from my more distant past here:
And finally, an image I use for my workshops, where we creative this faux movie poster, shooting the three figurative elements, and assembling everything with text and effects in Photoshop…
This image also appears as a project in the comprehensive online course in photo-Illustration available from my website:
The Fundamentals of Photo-Illustration in Photoshop
This course has over 9 hours of video, step-by-step instruction with 15 projects, all the work files, and extra materials downloadable for the outrageously low price of $99 — but you can purchase this course now for only $49 from this link or the link above
Each lesson in the course is designed to teach you fundamental techniques for masking, image adjustments, retouching, compositing, and special effects in a real world context, with the emphasis on practical, meaningful application. This is not just “tricks and tips” or technique for technique’s sake!
You can see additional examples of my photo-illustration work in my web gallery here:
