Photoshop
Photo retouching and compositing for print, screen, and large format
Photoshop work is mostly invisible when it goes well. The composite reads as one photograph taken in one place. The retouching looks like the scene on a good day. What people notice is the idea, not the seams holding it together.
Most of this gallery is built rather than shot: retractable banners, trade advertisements, journal covers, book covers, and campaign graphics that had to combine things no single camera could catch in one frame. A monitor and a global supply chain. An engraved portrait of Edison and an astronaut on a spacewalk. A drilling fitting and an open flame. Client photography, stock, 3D renders, and archival material all arrive in different light and different color, and the work is bringing them into one world convincingly enough that nobody stops to take it apart. Some of it supports research communication at Purdue and some of it is straight commercial work.
Everything is built non-destructively in layers at the resolution the final use demands, with the master file archived so a revision 2 years later does not mean starting over. A spread that has to land in InDesign at 300ppi gets built that way from the first step, and a banner that will stand 7 feet tall gets built at a size that holds up when you walk right up to it.
A spotlight on a black field gives the cover one bright object and nothing else to look at, which is what a title about presenting ideas should do. The magenta speech bubble is glossy enough to read as a physical thing under that light. The back then carries description, three endorsements, and two author bios without competing with the front.
The edit notes are left visible because the piece is about process, not result. Removing birds and refuse and correcting the sky are ordinary retouching moves, and showing the markup is what makes them legible to a client who has never commissioned this work. Proof persuades better than a finished frame.
Yellow machine against green canopy is the strongest color relationship in the industry, and it rewards restraint. Pulling saturation out of the foliage lets the machine stay the brightest object without shouting. The wordmark sits where the canopy has no competing detail.
Rendered in 3D rather than illustrated, because the review it accompanied concerned material behavior and the geometry had to be defensible. The radiation beam gives the cover a single diagonal, which is what carries at thumbnail size in a table of contents. Covers get chosen at that size.
Three archival sources at three different resolutions and grain structures, unified by a single sepia treatment. That one treatment is what turns unmatched historical material into a set. The banknote engraving underneath supplies the texture that ties the portraits down.
The flame is composited, which gives full control over where the heat falls and how bright it reads. Rebuilding the reflections on the brass to match light that was never there is what sells it. It is the part nobody notices when it is done correctly.
Two banners covering the two audiences the program has: partners who need the framework and students who need to see themselves in it. The hexagon diagram serves the first and the project photography serves the second. Sparks supply heat a diagram cannot generate on its own.
Compositing exists to put things in one frame that were never in one room. A monitor, a global supply chain, and a finite element stress render assemble into a single argument about what a virtual factory is. This kind of work is judged entirely on the seams.