Thursday 22 July 2010

Bad Hair Day - 22nd July 2010

Slightly sooner than intended it’s time to return to the theme of cover art once more, or to be precise a bad hair day.

If you remember, in an earlier post, I talked about the girl with the blonde bob standing in front of the Sydney Opera House at sunset. Let’s change change this hypothetical situation slightly, give her waist length hair, maybe slightly curly, but free, not contained in a pony tail, or otherwise pinned up. Instead of the Opera House, how about the photo being from the top of the Harbour Bridge, looking down over the bay on a windy day.

You’ve probably foreseen where the bad hair day reference comes from. Can you imagine standing on top of that colossal steel bridge on a windy day with long hair? Can you imagine keeping it under control? So you take the perfect photo, or rather pick that perfect photo up from the stock photo library and the author then decides she’s perfect, but the Opera House was still the right background. Now, in order to cut the image of the woman from the background you have to select every single strand of wayward hair from the overall picture. Every single strand of light blonde hair, blown in all directions from a sky filled with whites and greys and light blues (it was a cloudy day). Do you think any author, especially those without experience of the cover art process, will understand exactly how bloody long that would take?

I’ll tell you how long, days of work, not mere hours, bloody days. If as a cover artist you try and short circuit it, and not crop every hair, do you suppose this author won’t notice? Believe me he, or she, most definitely will, and will complain endlessly about the fact the hair just isn’t as good as on the original image.

Then when you’ve literally bled from under your fingernails getting every bit transferred onto the correct background, spent another couple of hours adjusting the lighting to match, one of two things will happen. The author will say, I’d like the hair a little darker, it’s too obviously bottle blonde (it isn’t!), or she’s not facing far enough into the camera. Scream in agony but don’t answer the e-mail for at least an hour. Then scream on paper.

There are tricks of course, ways of faking it, disguising the fake hair you add, but the selection and digital cutting of hair from a background remains one of the toughest photo manipulation techniques around.

The worst one though is the author then turns round and says – I don’t like it - it looks artificial. Can we try something else? Small wonder the answer to that isn’t just no, it’s HELL NO!

NO AUTHOR'S FEELINGS WERE HURT IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS BLOG.

2 comments:

  1. LOL. After watching my daughter try to change hair color even slightly, I feel for you. The cutting, shading by fractions, the use of the clone brush... There's a reason I'm the writer and not the cover artist!

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  2. If I ever get a publisher I promise not to be a pain in the a**e.
    HONEST.

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