“Just grab it from the web!”
We’ve all heard that response after asking for a headshot of an awardee, commencement speaker, or other VIP. Then we’ve felt that sense of dread waiting for the reply to your request for a high quality studio portrait only to face your doom when you receive a 25k attachment or worse, a Word file with an image pasted into it.
“But, but, this person is supposed to be important! How can this represent importance?” you sob, as you view what can only be cordially described as a low-res mug shot from the previous decade.
I’ve been dealing with this phenomenon for the twenty years I’ve worked in higher-ed, and even at my previous job, as a graphic designer for the convention management department of a large hobby-gaming company. There we would routinely book celebrities from sci-fi and fantasy movies and television shows, and the images we would get from their publicists or studios were often surprisingly terrible. Back then, in the late 90’s they were usually black and white prints, but even those were mostly second or third generation with no shadow or highlight detail and, after scanning, only usable at a small size. Somehow, it’s even worse today, despite the fact nearly everyone has a ten megapixel smart phone in their pocket.
There is clearly an operational formula for photo quality that the majority of our clients follow with fanatical orthodoxy:
The importance of a photo’s subject is inversely proportional to the quality of the image available; or S∝Q
So what can you do when you are given a garbage image that needs to appear in your carefully designed book that will be printed on high quality paper using your best print vendor? There are generally three professionally acceptable ways to deal with this situation. You know what the others are.
The first thing to do is ask the client for something better. Make sure to remain pleasant and helpful. Things like image resolution that are elementary concepts in our profession can be completely alien to the non-creatives. Be very specific about the dimensions and resolution that you need and explain how helpful those features would be to portray the subject in the best, and highest quality, light. Getting technical with your terms is ok as well. Often, if you are dealing with a poor overworked admin or someone else not familiar with photography and printing, the technical jargon might lead them to forward your request to someone they know who understands such things and you might end up being connected with a photographer or another designer who will know exactly what you need. After that you’ll be off to the races.
Failing that, your second option would be to request to photograph the person. If the subject works on campus and you have a photographer on staff, it can be as simple as arranging a time for them to meet and discussing exactly what you need with your photographer. You’ll end up with the shot you need and the rest of your colleagues will have a current high quality image of this person that they can use for other pieces, social media, or the web. If the subject isn’t at hand and the budget allows, hire a freelancer who is local to the subject.
For an on-campus subject you have another photography option as well; shoot it yourself. You know what you want and you’ve hung around photographers long enough to know a few basics, so bring your camera or smart phone and meet the subject in a place with decent light and a nondescript background, or a space with enough depth that you can shoot with the background out of focus. Don’t forget to think about clothing; if you are stuck with a busy background ask the subject to wear a solid color, or if the background is a flat color make sure they are wearing something that contrasts with it.
The third option is to acknowledge that what you have is as good as it’ll get, so you need to make a decision. Use it and hope no one notices, which is a reasonable option if the piece has a limited audience and/or there is only one portrait to contend with. Or, take what you have and use it as a reference for some sort of portrait illustration. A simple line drawing can sometimes create an air of elegance or simplicity; you are basically turning a liability into an asset. Add a little watercolor to it to really make it pop. However doing this is realistically only an option if the designer has illustration skills in her bag of tricks. Hiring a freelance illustrator will usually be budget busting in higher-ed. Which leaves you with some digital alternatives.
We all know how cheesy Photoshop filters can be if used indiscriminately, but there are alternatives. Some really great photo filters for iOS and Android exist that are often better than what’s supplied with PS. Resources in this vein are plentiful and a good starting point. For some architectural renderings I’ve done a quick line drawing over the top of an image filtered through a really great watercolor effect app called Waterlogue.
A problem I had to solve with our commencement book that falls within our third option here is what prompted this article.
Our commencement materials are printed in one color to keep our costs down so we can continue to foil stamp our cover to create a real keepsake. At a certain point a few years ago, leadership decided that all of the honorary degree and high level award winners should have a headshot in the booklet. That’s when the first wave of terrible headshots hit. Each year since there have always been one or two in the group of ten to fifteen.
Printing them in color was out, and making hand drawn versions wasn’t possible due to time constraints, the number of headshots, and being unable to agree on a style. So I proposed a process that would attempt to digitally mimic what the Wall Street Journal does with their headshots, called a “hedcut” by the WSJ; an editorial choice that I’ve admired for years.
I originally used a Photoshop Plug-In called Engraver III which produced some really wonderful effects but needed a lot of trial and error and was a bit too buggy for our limited production time. Last year I began using a new technique that I found on YouTube channel Texturelabs. While I followed the steps pretty much as laid out in the tutorial, I decided to add some more uniformity by removing the backgrounds from the photos. I also found that bumping up the contrast and brightness of the images resulted in better tonal separation, which improved the effect. I also tended to go a lot lighter on the first Oil Paint filter pass because we tend to use this just for headshots which are typically a lot smaller than the image used in the tutorial. Due to our production process I like to save the files as 1-bit 1200dpi TIFF files, but that may not work for everyone so do what suits your needs best.
Here are two examples; the one on the top is a high quality studio photo (3000px x 4499px), while the one on the bottom was a poor quality low-res snapshot (450px x 600px). I have also included the base texture file to download and try out.
If you happen to know what to look for you can tell which image was low-res to begin with, but with this technique the resolution is less important than the lighting and contrast. A low-res image with good contrast will often look better than a higher-res one that is really flat or busy.
Lastly it’s important to remain flexible with your page design, especially if you have to deal with a series of images. Sometimes you need to design for the lowest quality image you are provided if there is no alternative. For example when some of the images are monochrome and the rest full color, make them all monochrome or duotone. When a series of headshots need to appear in a group it’s good practice to make sure the heads are all approximately the same size. If one of the files is simply cropped too tightly for this to work a fix is to crop all of the rest of them tightly to match.
Using this technique let’s you change what was once a mismatch into an expressed intent for the images to look the way they way they do. The reader may never even know there was a problem that needed to be solved; good design is often invisible.
Michael Osadciw is the Creative and Design Manager, University Communications, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA