The Dark Side Of Chocolate

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The Dark Side Of Chocolate
A sweet job for retoucher Michael Tompert involved bringing this
delicious confection to life.
May 02, 2007
By Hal Stucker
Chocolate has earned a place in the collective fantasy life of the human
race, symbolic of sex, love, pleasure and luxury. Those were the
connotations that retoucher Michael Tompert of Raygun Studio in Palo
Alto, California, and art director Michael Wilde of San Francisco's Maiden
Lane Communications sought to capture in the campaign that Maiden
Lane pitched last year to chocolate maker Ghirardelli. One of the images
showed a Venus fly trap made out of chocolate; the copy read, 'Bite it
before it bites you.'"
Tompert created the chocolate "skin" covering each subject entirely from
scratch, so his greatest challenge was making the objects in each image
appear as if they were actually made from chocolate—the way chocolate
Easter bunnies are.
For inspiration, he first went to the Web and searched for pictures of
chocolate, to get different ideas about the highlights, shadows and
textures found in pieces of chocolate. He then undertook the informative,
but potentially fattening, study of actual chunks of the stuff, viewing the
samples with different types of illumination and studying the way light
interacted with each surface. He soon discovered that the key to creating
a believable image was in getting the color absolutely right. The ads were
for dark chocolate, so he usually went all the way to black on the color
and then came back a little, and added just the right mixture of reds and
browns.
The ad that shows a chocolate eye and bears the tagline "Maybe you
should be afraid of the dark" provides a good example of some of the
intricacies involved and some of the creative choices Tompert made. The
initial image came from a royalty-free stock photo.
He first masked out the skin and used curves to take the color down to a
dark brown, while also painting black into the shadows to make those
even darker, and also using masks to selectively add red and brown tints
to highlights and mid-tones. He then began drawing the eyelashes, first
drawing a path to create the shape, then using the smudge tool to "finger
paint" in the color on the path, and to create blur and give the lashes the
effect of depth-of-field falloff. "It's all in how you control the smudge
effect, how much you control the fade-out and the strength of the
smudge that makes it sharp or blurred, and also in the shape of the
'finger' you're using to apply the tone."
Chocolate starts out as liquid. So all the objects he created had to
suggest that kind of flow, as if it had, at one time, been poured into a
mold and then solidified. This meant that the points at which the lashes
connected to the eyelid needed to have a slightly rounded, somewhat
"liquid" look, which Tompert also achieved using the smudge tool. He
used the same method to connect the spikes on the Venus flytrap to the
"mouth" of the flower, also adding blur there to simulate falloff in depth
of field.
To add highlights, he used Photoshop's layer effects and worked in screen
mode removing the dark tone. He also placed the highlights on the
undersides of the lashes, to give the subtle effect of light emanating from
the eye, rather than the eye being illuminated by an outside source.
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the eye, rather than the eye being illuminated by an outside source.
Lastly, he used the dodge and burn tool to fine-tune both highlights
and shadows.
On his first attempt, Tompert had added a fair amount of red to the skin
and the lashes, trying to give the effect of a matte surface, similar to
what you would find on a powdered-chocolate truffle. This, however,
turned out to be the one instance where even a subtle change in color
destroyed the effect. Tompert went back to the image, subtracted red and
added black, further painted down the shadows, and added white to the
eyelash highlights to increase contrast. He finished by also enhancing the
highlight in the pupil, drawing a second shape over the existing highlight
and then brightening and sharpening it to make it cleaner.
Alas, for all the hard work involved, Ghirardelli wasn't sold on the Maiden
Lane pitch. Tompert, however, is sanguine, pointing to his chocolate
series as both an interesting exercise in visualization and a nice addition
to his portfolio.
More tips and tricks: Creating the Venus Flytrap
Tompert created this image almost entirely within Photoshop, using only
a stock photograph of a piece of velvet for the background. After studying
a number of photographs to understand the basic structure of the plant,
Tompert began by drawing the shape that would become the flower's left
lip. "I wanted to make sure I was getting the reflections and the material
right, and make sure I had the feel and the glossy look down," he says.
Here he used Photoshop's layer effects to create a beveled edge on the
lip and to add highlights and shadows. "It's a very deep function," he
says of the effects. "Among the things you can do, you change the way
light reacts to a surface, and you can position a light to provide a
highlight."
He then used the pen tool to draw the shape of the spikes, and filled the
shapes with color. "In Photoshop, you can then give these shapes
attributes," he says. "You can give them thickness, they can throw a
shadow, they can accept light, like an object in a high-end 3D program.
The layer effects won't necessarily get you all the way to where you want
to go, but they'll take you about 90 percent of where you want to get the
image." For example, the reflection the layer effect added to the spike
dropped off too early, and didn't run to the end of the tip, so Tompert
had to smudge and paint in the rest.
Tompert was also careful to keep edges rounded and plump, in order to
give the effect of a molded chocolate object that had once been liquid. As
a final touch, he used the smudge tool to add blur to selected parts of
the image, to give the effect of falloff in the camera's depth of field.
Raygun Studio
Address: 514 High Street, Atelier
Ads by Google
Palo Alto, CA 94301
Phone: (650) 324-3402
Web: www.raygunstudio.com
Contact: Michael Tompert
E-mail: [email protected]
Equipment: Michael Tompert uses Mac G6s, with rendering done on an
array of 6 minis, both G4s and dual-core Intels, controlled via Apple
Remote Desktop running Strata RenderPro. For storage, Tompert
maintains a dual-core Intel mini-based file server and data archive, with
4 terrabytes of storage—enough to hold over ten years of work.
Scanning is done with an Epson Perfection flatbed scanner, proofing with
an Epson 3800 with ColorBurst.
Digital Photo Workshops
Classes with digital landscape photo pioneer
Stephen Johnson
www.sjphoto.com