This is how my product spread looks so far minus the captions and headline (there’s a lot of space in there to allow for the writing).
When picking out a background, I decided to “paint” an abstract design in photoshop for a few reasons:
- Neither a flat gray nor flat white background seemed to complement the look of the original photos as much as the original backgrounds in the photos (with shadings and gradations in color) did. I didn’t want to lose the look of the original photos.
- I liked the idea of challenging myself to “paint” in Photoshop because that’s a technique I’m not used to using. It’s the sort of thing where, over the years, I’ve come up with solutions like printing things out, painting a background with actual watercolors or something, scanning it back in, and then finishing a few details in Photoshop. I want to feel comfortable doing this sort of thing digitally, so this was good practice!
- The “painted” texture supports the theme of historical fashion influencing modern accessories
This is layered a bit like a traditional painting might be, with many layers of various opacities. Some are only 5-10% opaque but add to the overall texture and color of the final image. There’s not much under the masked out sections of the photos, because those parts weren’t visible at all while I was working on this. I put the photos on the top layer and then sampled the colors from the bits of the background that I left visible during the masking process.
I probably would not use this approach to building a background super frequently because it’s time-consuming, and usually just a clean masking layer around an image over a plain background is effective for this sort of thing. It’s definitely been great for practicing a skill I wanted to work on in a context where the more textured background fits the theme, though!