Poster - Photoshop Development

We decided to go with this image as we thought it was the most communicative an digestible for the audience.

Here's a sketch of our proposed poster.

To start off the photoshop development, we unlocked and renamed the layer as 'Base Image' in order to not confuse it with other layers. And to also have a 'start fresh' point if anything went wrong during the editing process.

Next, the crop tool was used to make the image portrait. The reasoning behind this was that most posters we looked at in our research were portrait unless the film was mainstream produced by a conglomerate and was to be posted on billboards.

In order to make the focal feature of the poster (Noah) more prominent, we roughly lassoed around him and copy and pasted it to a new layer. We then subtly increased the contrast, the sharpness and then used the blur tool around the lasso line in order for it to make a smooth transition into the background.

The next step was to alter the image qualities. We first experimented with the contrast. This gave the image more depth allowing the two movements to become more explicit.

Next we made some colour variations using the colour balance tool. The one that we liked the best was the teal coloured image just above. We thought it looked the most professional subdued colours matching the tone of our film.

With the base of our image done, we then moved on to creating and introducing the graphics such as; the mute icon, film title, the tag line, the release date and a few credit tags.

The first was the mute icon. We sourced this icon off Google Images and imported it into our poster. Surprisingly, the image scale was almost perfect, to improve it we used to transform scale option from the 'Edit' dropdown menu.  We positioned just lower of the chin allowing Noah to still be the focal point of the poster.

We also added the release date to the bottom of the poster as it's a vital element to be included in all successful film posters. We chose to use a pixelated font to match the pixelated mute icon. We got this font off of a font sharing website and saved it as a picture to edit in Photoshop as it didn't come in white which id the desired colour. We altered the colour by selecting the font within the image and using the invert colour tool changed the text colour to white. The same effect could have been achieved with the paintbucket tool. We did the same with the film title and the tag line. 

 The original font.

 The selected font prior using the 'invert' tool.

After the colour alterations were finished, we used the 'copy and paste' tools to transfer them onto to poster image.

When transferring the text over to the image, we really started to see how blue the image was. It started to look like an Instagram filter, which is not at all professional. To change this, we altered the vibrancy, the hue and the lightness of the image. This gave the image a more predominate forrest green tint. 

However, Noah's face still looked a little washed out. We then selected the layer just including the Noah, excluding the background, and further increase the vibrancy and saturation. This gave Noah's face more of a human colour.

The next step was to add the credit tags. In our research we noticed that the credit tags within a film poster are often in a slim, narrow font differing rom the rest of the text. We searched on the font sharing website we used previously and found a suitable candidate. 

We used the same method as we did before with the film title, however we didn't invert the colour this time as we were placing it at the top of the poster where black would stand out more. 

We also wanted to add our prestigious 'Palme D'or' award to the poster. We did this by finding the logo on Google Images. Unfortunately we couldn't find a PNG file so we had to use a JPEG instead and just got rid of the white background. As we did with all the other elements, we copied and pasted it to the poster image, re-sized and positioned it.

We had now finished our poster:

We are very pleased with the final outcome as we feel that it effectively communicates the tone and the emotion of our trailer.