Making a big splash at a major promotional event often requires an image that sets one apart from the others. As one of several sponsors of LA's Largest Mixer XI in July, Reactive Imaging set out to to create just that.
Beginning with the licensed RGB photo of a woman splashing plain water in her face, Adobe Photoshop was used to narrow and equalize shoulders so she fits symmetrically into the layouts. Blemishes were removed and skin tones lightened. Then the real work began. The water splashes had to be separated from the figure. The file was saved as LZW TIFF because it supports layers, channels, paths and reduces file size without color loss.
Duplicating the layer and applying unsharp mask with the amount set to the maximum of 500 accentuated the water drops against the black background. For water overlapping the skin, unwanted areas had to be painted out. Before doing so, the layer was copied into a channel so it would become a grayscale mask. The extra color layer was discarded. Some drops overlapping the face and hands had to be partially masked (dark gray) for translucency. Dark areas within the middle of the splashes were lightened about 65 percent using the eraser tool. Midtones for the entire channel were further lightened with a Levels adjustment and a slight Gaussian blur applied. A few shapes in critical areas were masked using the pen tool. After all the masking was done, color was added.
Cyan, magenta and yellow are primary printing colors so these became the hues our woman splashes on her face. A new layer was set to Color Burn. Here, the primary colors were painted over the black areas. The channel was used as a layer mask. In some areas the mask had to be manually edited to obtain richer or more translucent color effects. In other areas, painting with brush tool directly over droplets against black background was required for richer color. The splashes overlapping skin are not as vibrant, so were built up by painting color tints while the layer mask was used as a selection.
A Curves adjustment layer was added between the color splashes and the woman for additional fleshtone lightening before copies were saved as both CMYK and RGB TIFF for different uses. The end result, when printed, presents the illusion of a woman splashing the ink from the page onto her face. Look for the splash of color woman on the backs of your LA's Largest Mixer XI admission ticket.