Comic Book Covers and Football

I just finished shooting some Friday night football and I still have pent up energy so I thought why not write some to wind down. By the way if you are shooting football in Texas or in any southern state, drink lots of water before and after the game. It is freaking hot out there especially on that fake grass. And to keep alert its best to stay hydrated.

Now onto the point of this blog.

Every year at the start of the football season my newspaper puts together a comprehensive section about the university, local high schools and area high schools football teams.

This year we decided pay homage to comic book covers for the 2007 Football Preview. I had plan on doing comic book covers last year after we finished the 2006 Football Preview. I was inspired by these television shows and movies about comic book heroes. I pitched the idea to the sports editor and he was excited about going forward. I then got a page designer on board who was really into comic books and who helped design the look of the section. The hard part was to come up with a Photoshop filter that would make the portraits look like comic book drawings but still like portraits. I did some research online and combined the best of what I read and came up with the filter I call TalleyHo. You can download the Photoshop action from the Bio page at my website.

When we color correct for the newspaper we sharpen our pictures because of the newsprint the paper is published on. So I left out the Unsharp Masking filter as part of the TalleyHo action. It was a bonus that unsharp masking the photo for the paper enhanced the TalleyHo action. For our paper we use the Unsharp Mask filter set to: sharpening 500%, radius 1.0, and threshold 5.

When shooting your portraits it is also necessary to overexpose the photo by about a 1 to 1 1/2 stops. TalleyHo loves highlights and dark shadows which adds to the comic book drawing effect.

I think this years preview turned out well and I am already planning next years section covers.

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