Adobe Creative Cloud®
Photo Composites
Last year I got to work on a very exciting project for Adobe. They wanted me to create a piece of artwork that represented creativity, wonder, play and for it to be colorful because the brand itself is that way. The creative team was aware that I am a traditional photo compositor, that's exactly why they chose me. They wanted to perform sort of an experiment with someone who is not used to incorporating A.I tools into his workflow.
I am a straight up Adobe Photoshop® guy. And I have incorporated a few of the generative tools into my workflow already; like the Generative Fill, Generative Expand and the Remove Tool. Buy they wanted me to push myself forward. I was up for the challenge.
They wanted to create the first artwork using only traditional photographic assets and then create 2 additional versions but trying to incorporate more and more A.I. generation tools and assets each time. So that's exactly what I did.
For the first artwork I wanted to do something bold and colorful as this one would set the tone for the rest. Conceptually I played with the concept of "misfits". You know as a creative person sometimes you feel like you don't belong in certain places like the corporate world of the scientific world but you can still shine in those places. So this sparked the idea of representing visual contextual contrast between the subjects and the environment they are in even thought they technically don't belong there.
So for this first execution I went for the idea of fish in the desert because they clearly don't belong there but this can look cool (so I thought!). Some of the most beautiful and colorful fish I know are betta fish, so I gathered betta fish stock images from Adobe Stock®, a couple of desert images as well for the background and got to work right away.
Here is the layer breakdown of the retouching and photo composite process for the desert fish artwork. Pretty straight forward photo composite job. This is what I normally do; gathering a few stock photography assets from Adobe Stock® and putting them all together using traditional Adobe Photoshop® techniques.
For the second artwork I kept the concept of contextual contrast. Flowers in a concrete jungle was the execution that came to mind. This time I was gonna make the city / concrete background using stock images from Adobe Stock® and then I would generate the subjects (flowers) using the web version of Adobe FireFly®. I did try generating them inside Photoshop with the integrated generative tools but they were a bit limiting. The website version of Adobe FireFly is much more intuitive and has more useful features.
Here is the layer breakdown of the retouching and photo composite process for the rooftop flowers artwork. This still felt like a normal photo composite job. The only difference was the A.I generation of the new subjects. But once you have them you just treat them as regular stock photography assets.
For the third execution of this conceptual contrast we went for machines underwater since electronic machines typically are not meant to work underwater. So an underwater ocean scene seemed fitting and the subjects to be robots. However, I tried to play with the textures of the robots inside Adobe Firefly® so they are not all made out of metal. I prompted the use of wood, plastic, clay and even yarn to make these subjects interesting and not related in terms of materials. I think they came out pretty well. Asking for the generated assets to be underwater helped a lot with the photo composite integration and lighting work inside Adobe Photoshop® as oppose to asking for the robots to be on a white background. Lighting would have been totally different. This made my job a lot easier.
Finally, here is the layer breakdown of the retouching and photo composite process for the underwater robots artwork. This was actually really fun. It is a completely different process having to conceptualize thinking on how to gather your assets by generating them using A.I. prompts. Makes you a bit more proactive since you are not just reacting to the images that already exist on stock photography databases but you have to be super specific in what you want in order to the A.I model to produce the desired output.
The artworks themselves were used as Expressive A logos on the Black Friday promotion all throughout Adobe Creative Cloud's social media channels. I was only able to see the ones they used for Latin America given that I am based in Costa Rica but I was told they used them all over the world.
I also created a Behind The Scenes Instagram reel showcasing the connecting and photo compositing process. It was shared on Adobe Creative Cloud's Instagram profile as a featured artist post and stories. I feel very honored of having been considered for this project. It was challenging but super fun to execute.
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