November 1, 2008

Maruchan Ramen, mmm.

Yeah, I know, but let's just get to the technicalities:

Make a magazine ad for a product. The product is to be brought in to class, taken a picture of and edited (highlights, tones, balance, noise, etc). Visual hierarchy: model, product, advertising line, and body copy.


Took the DNG of the product into photoshop, edited split tones for orange highlights and blue shadows. Messed with the tone curves for some weaker highlights, greater lighting, and brought out the shadows more. Healed and stamped out some of the disgusting highlights shining off the plastic ramen package.

As for the model, the picture was taken with a craptastic canon digicam. The noise was disgusting and the auto for the ISO is horrible. Was going to set it on manual but time was of the essence (even though I ended up taking about 100 pictures, literally, maybe 150). Anyway, this was the best I could get from shooting indoors and no proper lighting (I'm soooo making a light diffuser box after this, omg).

Anyway, since I was basically overcasted by this rather odd tungsten lighting, I had to split tones on this one as well, but even more with the orange and blue. I would like to thank adobe right now for allowing .jpgs to be edited like camera raw files. Anyway, I cleaned up some of the blemishes on my face, and even liquefied it, too much I think (yeah, way too much). I tried to get rid of the noise as best as I could. I filled light on it with some orange, upped the temperature on me (to give myself the orange color cast, you know...radiosity =D).

That's about all I did to the model picture. After fixing it all up, I extracted myself from the original picture (or actually, I think I extracted myself first). I then googled: "Japanese Restaurant" and got the background you see with the rice-paper or w/e they're making it out of now.

Well, actually, I did that first, and edited myself accordingly o.0 Point is, after I edited myself, I plopped myself into the picture and set myself to look as if I was eating there, yay.

As for the Logo, the top one, I got from brandsoftheworld:

http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/search/69985864/59065.html

imported the EPS into illustrator and fixed some things that looked bad. Now, whoever does these logos...they suck. They do. I mean, they probably just extracted it from a jpeg and auto created the outlines in illustrator, so...can't blame them, but the way the things were layered made me want to tear my hair out.

Anyway, I plopped the logo on the top to make it look from well...Maruchan. I then created the logo on the bottom left myself, really simple and fun (I personally think the logo is genius). Anyway, I got some curly type to resemble the noodles (speaking of I forgot to say I had to color burn the ramen noodles in the picture because when you cook maruchan ramen for an extended period of time, it tends to get...gushy? gooey? dunno, but it clumps together like nasty slimy mash). After that, I got Maruchan's tag line, put it next to the logo, and wrote some filler text since I could not get a body copy from Maruchan's website (localization fail on Maruchan's part).

That's it!

1 comment:

Elizabeth McMahill said...

When I was looking at the full res I was thinking it was a cutout, and I was right! Really nice job adjusting the colors and lighting. It looks cohesive.