Advice to Make Poster More "Vibrant"

[Shellshocker]

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, new to the forum, please move/delete as appropriate.

I'm very new to Photoshop having dabbled in it for a few years but nothing by any means beyond absolute novice.
I was asked to create a poster for a boxing team, just a logo with their old photos and logo, so I went for a mosaic style. My first attempt following a brief tutorial, and developed the attached image. Considering I spent hours resizing and positioning a lot of the images, it seems bland and doesn't justify my effort at all.
Any advice to make it better, and more importantly please explain the procedure (or link to a tutorial), would make my weekend so much better
I want to make the logo pop, but don't know how to make it happen.

Thanks guy.

 

[MikeMc]

Start playing with vibrance, saturation, contrast and sharpness...oversharpening can make details pop...also multiple layers and then play with blending modes

With large amounts of B&W, contrast and sharpness will help

 

[ALB68]

In this example, I applied a Selective Color adjustment layer. Set to neutral colors. Then pull the Magenta slider to the left, this will increase the pop in your green logo. Now you don't want this adjustment to effect anything except the green X, so you do that by applying a layer mask (if you don't know how, learn). Once you have the layer mask applied, click on it and enter Ctrl I (eye) which will invert the mask. Then, take your paint brush tool set to white and start painting inside the X (in the mask). This will apply the adjustment wherever you paint. Once that's done to your satisfaction, then select the layer and go to Filters/Sharpen/ Unsharp mask and adjust sliders to your satisfaction. This is what I got.

 

[Tom Mann]

The fundamenal problem is that your background is too "busy" and has too much contrast. This should be fixed before you merge the layers, not after they are merged. One very simple way would be to put a levels adjustment layer immediately above your background layer(s), and pull the slider on the lowest right hand side slider about half way over to the left. This will reduce the brightness and contrast of it so that the text and other layers that are above it in the stack can be made to stand out better by increasing their opacities to nearly 100%.

Another thing that would be helpful is to slightly blur the background (just 1 or 2 px or so should be sufficient), leaving the text and other photos at full sharpnesss.

Tom M

 

[dv8_fx]

Hi there.

With a bit of contrast and and lowering of brightness adjustment, the montage background will look better.

It's the logo that needs a bit of re-work. Why not use a metallic/grunge texture on the logo rather than the green with red outline. The logo colors is what makes it look bland.

As it stands now, adding a drop shadow will just muddle the look even more. With a solid textured logo , the drop shadow makes the logo stand out even more.

Add a lighting effect - like pinspot-lights shining down on the logo.

 

[Shellshocker]

It's the logo that needs a bit of re-work. Why not use a metallic/grunge texture on the logo rather than the green with red outline. The logo colors is what makes it look bland.

I should have mentioned it as I thought it when uploading. The logo is actually Red outlined with a yellow fill, this is the "clients" logo colours.
It is also an A1 sizes poster, and I compressed it for upload which seems to have turned it green rather than a dirty yellow.

But I understand what you mean, I am working on maybe bringing out the yellow/red more, to make it stand out rather than overlay.

 

[Shellshocker]

The fundamenal problem is that your background is too "busy" and has too much contrast. This should be fixed before you merge the layers, not after they are merged. One very simple way would be to put a levels adjustment layer immediately above your background layer(s), and pull the slider on the lowest right hand side slider about half way over to the left. This will reduce the brightness and contrast of it so that the text and other layers that are above it in the stack can be made to stand out better by increasing their opacities to nearly 100%.

Another thing that would be helpful is to slightly blur the background (just 1 or 2 px or so should be sufficient), leaving the text and other photos at full sharpnesss.

Tom M

Thats a brilliant idea, looking at it, I get what you mean by busy. I have been staring at it for hours and got used to it to notice.
Definitely going try what you mentioned, specially the blur.
Thanks for the advice.

 

[Shellshocker]

I've tried to apply the suggested. I changed the Levels to lower the Brightness and fix the Contrast, which has made it darker and added a Gaussian Blur to the Background pictures. I left the larger images more visible but with a small blur to them too. Ideally I'd like to feather them a little bit so the edges on the larger images aren't so sharp.

The way I have done this is created a Background Pattern layer with the small images, Desaturated that to give it the B&W. I then placed it over the "IX Boxing" layer and Subtracted it (and now made the adjustments suggested)
With this done I can't figure about a way to make the "IX" more vibrant. So it glowing in a sense, more yellow and red?

(The original image is A1 so I've had to compress it, so it may look a little less quality, the logo is originally bright yellow before the Subtract into the BG)

 

[Tom Mann]

I don't understand why in the world you would put the text (which is the most important aspect of the image) under the background layer (which is of lesser importance). ?????

Why don't you just post your PSD file, or, if necessary, a smaller, down-rez'ed version of it, and we'll have a look.

Tom M

PS - By any chance, were you thinking of this in terms of the sequence of deposition of inks when printing?

 

[Tom Mann]

Also, to have your image display properly on the web, it absolutely must be converted to sRGB b4 posting. The CMYK SWOP space that it currently is in will not display properly in any browser that I know of.

Tom

 

[Shellshocker]

I don't understand why in the world you would put the text (which is the most important aspect of the image) under the background layer (which is of lesser importance). ?????

Why don't you just post your PSD file, or, if necessary, a smaller, down-rez'ed version of it, and we'll have a look.

Tom M

Due to the size, and amount of images in the project. The PSD is almost 1gb in size, otherwise I'd post it over.
The idea behind the poster is to display the past images of previous boxers and events from the team, they gave me hundreds of printed old images (all badly taken, all needed correction) which I scanned and they wanted me to display them in some creative way. I though this was ideal, but my extremely limited knowledge of PH became a huge drawback in my big ambitions.
Being A1 currently you'll be able to make out fair detail in the background images (which is what I want). I want the logo integrated but not as much as it is. It is going to go to a professional Reprographics company, and they basically said, you make it, we print it. I done it in CMYK for this purpose.

Ideally I want it to "pop" a bit more than it is, get some kind of glow on the edges.

Sorry for my ignorance, but my expertise with PH begins and ends with using PhotoLooks to correct images. I really appreciate all your help.

 

[Tom Mann]

If the poster currently is 5000 pixels in the long dimension, just down rez it to 500 pixels in the long dimension, and the size of the file will decrease to 1% of the current 1 Gig, so it should be very easy to post. Allowing us to see exactly what you did will make it much easier for us to discuss it, and we will be happy to do so.

Tom M

 

[Shellshocker]

Seems I don't have enough posts to post links just yet.

 

[Shellshocker]

Actually that last post did it haha
Hope you can do some magic with this, or basic Photoshop as you'll call it

https://mega.co.nz/#!i8lgFKQK!ODdQWEpgdFP5C2y6rV0qMCQXaQX6girJPMaHzt0SlIE

 

[Tom Mann]

How does something along these lines grab you?

Tom

PS - BTW, because it already illustrated the general idea, I didn't apply the lighting efx suggested by dv8_fx to the bottom two (larger) photos, only the top two, but this should give you a general idea of how such lighting efx could look. As with everything else on this tweaked version (eg, the colors used for the tints, the gradients, etc. etc.), everything is infinitely adjustable -- the particular version I posted was just a starting point / suggestion. However, I should point out that the way I made the large text stand out was to invert the order of your layers (ie, text at the top of the layer stack), and did all my work in RGB and mostly normal blending modes, not CMYK using "subtract" layer blending mode. If you really want some suggestion of the underlying photo mosaic to show (slightly) through the text, it's much easier to modify this approach to add it, rather than working around the original ordering of the layers and fighting the lack of color. Personally, I would leave the text a solid color, or add some other texture and glints to it, again, as suggested by dv8.

 

[Shellshocker]

Thanks for the advice. I really like what you've done there.
I'm playing around with the Background colouring, I think giving it a slight rustic look. Never even considered moving away from the grey before.
I really like the lighting efx, really gives the images more entity, how did you add the lighting efx (plugin?)
However it is killing me to be stubborn, but I am still quite a fan of integrating the logo into the Background, mainly because the poster is meant to be more about the images and the logo somewhat of a second thought to indicate whom they belong too.
How adding a grudge texture to darken the logo and then overlaying it create my desired effect, or am I going about this wrong?

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi ShellS - i'm just leaving the house for a shoot, so I don't have time at the moment to respond to your questions. But I'll try to get back to you late tonight.

Tom.

 

[Tom Mann]

Thanks for the advice. I really like what you've done there.
I'm playing around with the Background colouring, I think giving it a slight rustic look. Never even considered moving away from the grey before.
I really like the lighting efx, really gives the images more entity, how did you add the lighting efx (plugin?)
However it is killing me to be stubborn, but I am still quite a fan of integrating the logo into the Background, mainly because the poster is meant to be more about the images and the logo somewhat of a second thought to indicate whom they belong too.
How adding a grudge texture to darken the logo and then overlaying it create my desired effect, or am I going about this wrong?

1. I added the lighting using the "lighting efx" filter in PS CC 2014. It's located in the filter / render / lighting efx menu. It was available in previous versions of PS, but may be in a slightly different place in earlier versions. Unfortunately, I don't have any older versions of PS installed on this machine, so I can't check. If, by some chance your version of PS doesn't have the lighting efx editor at all, it's very easy to get pretty much the same effect using just a masked solid color layer set to "overlay" or "soft light".

2. With respect to integrating the logo into the background, for a variety of reasons, that wouldn't be the route I would take, but if you want to go that direction, it's no problem to do so.

One way to achieve a more integrated look (ie, let the underlying photos show through, but keep as much of the color of the text as possible) is to separate the text and (tweaked) background onto their own separate layers. Then, duplicate the text-only layer. Set one of these layers to color blend mode, the other to luminosity blend mode. Set the opacity of the color layer to 100%, and adjust the opacity and BlendIF sliders to let as much of the background show through as you want. You can start with the settings show in the attached screen grabs. Also, note that I added a bit of contrast to the the lettering + photos showing through them.







HTH,

Tom M

PS - As before, to save some time for myself, I hardly did anything to the bottom half of the image, nor did I deal separately with the B&W text, nor to the graphic of the boxing gloves. You can play around with them separately using exactly the same techniques as used on the yellow letters.

PPS - I constructed this in RGB, so, if the printer is old school / cheap / stubborn, and refuses to do RGB-to-CMYK conversions for his clients, ask him to give you an output (ICC) profile for his press, install it, and use that to convert the RGB to CMYK as your final step, instead of just using the default SWOP(...whatever) that you used all the way through your work. I think you will have many fewer problems working the way I suggest.

 

[Shellshocker]

Sorry for the much delayed reply. In the end I decided to present both poster to my "client", with the integrated text and the one you suggested. Took half a day asking opinions himself, but decided that the integrated text achieved more of what he wanted, like a memorial to the boxers past (they ain't dead, they just do other stuff now haha). I took your advice on fading it, but realised that if I took it back to basics, and rebuilt the whole PSD, giving the "IX" more brightness and used what you suggested above, finally getting the effect I was after so many edits back.

I made the individual pictures pop, but didn't have time to learn Light Effects, maybe I was monging it, but couldn't figure out how to get the light to "shadow" under the picture as you'd done. But that is for another time.

Also I hadn't realised the significant difference in working in RGB vs CMYK, I thought it would be the same but one was suited for printing better. I just worked from RGB, the place this will get printed is pretty high tech, I'm sure they can handle it.

Thanks Tom Mann for all your help, I really did appreciate it. No doubt I'll be back with some more questions soon

 

[Tom Mann]

Great to hear from you, ShellS! I'm glad that you came up with something that your client liked. It can be a very tricky business trying to figure out exactly what a client wants, but when all is said and done, in commercial work, their opinion is all that counts.

Anyway, do drop back in and say hi from time to time, either with or without questions.

Best regards,

Tom M