How It Was Done

For the benefit of all the people who just love technical information (you know who you are), I have included a few nuggets at the bottom of the page.

The photo was taken by Mark Gilvey (your humble webmaster and student of Master Nam). As many of you may remember, several photos (6) were taken of the group. It is very difficult to get a large group of people to all look at the camera at the same time, particularly children. Like it or not, that is just a fact of photographing large groups. By taking several photos the odds of capturing at least one frame where each person is looking straight at the camera with a pleasant smile is greater.

After the photos are imported into the computer, they are cleaned-up and color corrected. The next step takes the longest and requires the most patience. Each person in each of the six frames is examined for the best expression. Once found, each face is composited into a single image that consists of everyone looking the best they could and without silly expressions or looking the wrong direction. This culling process took about 14 hours—ouch!!

I tried my best to find the best facial expression for each and every person. If you find that you do not agree with the facial expression I have selected, keep in mind that there probably wasn't a better one. There will be another chance the next time we take this photo.

Sometimes, even more retouching is required, for example; there was one student that was not wearing his uniform—he had a green long-sleeve sweater on that had to be replaced with a uniform. Can you tell which student? Keep looking because I am not going to tell you who it was..tee, hee, hee.

Once a final group photo with perfect expressions is isolated, the next step is to come up with a fun background treatment. By combining some color dabs and some noise and then zooming the whole background, a streaking effect was achieved. After this, the logo, a title and two stars were added and viola! I hope you like it.

Mark Gilvey

TECHY STUFF

• Camera: Nikon D70 (6.1 mp) with 24-85 f4 zoom. Photo was shot in RAW format (hint: don't use anything but RAW for your own photos if your camera offers it)
  
• Computer: Macintosh G4 with dual 1.2gHz processors and 1gb of RAM, LaCie Electron19BlueIII monitor, color calibrated
  
• Import Software: Nikon Picture Project
  
• Color Correction Software: LaserSoft DCPro Studio- an awesome program for managing digital photos, color correcting and preparing them for all kinds of output and much less expensive than Photoshop
  
• Retouching/Compositing Software: Adobe Photoshop CS-the big-kahuna of all retouching programs
  
• File Size: Final layered (only about 12 layers) file size was about 800mb in Adobe RGB (1998)