Graphic Photography

Blending Photography with Graphics in Photoshop: Six Projects That Sharpen Your Compositing Workflow
Video Tutorials

Blending Photography with Graphics in Photoshop: Six Projects That Sharpen Your Compositing Workflow

There is a category of client work I’ve been getting more frequently over the past two years. Ad agencies want something that sits between a clean product photo and a designed illustration. Not a retouched photograph. Not flat graphic design. Something in between, where the photo feels like it belongs inside a graphic world rather than just being dropped onto a background. I’ve solved this project-by-project, which means I’ve also been inconsistent about it.

Blending Photography With Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter
Video Tutorials

Blending Photography With Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter

Ad agencies have been asking for this aesthetic for the past two years and I kept patching together my own workflows from half a dozen different sources. You know the look: photography that sits inside an illustration, or a portrait that bleeds into a graphic texture system, or product shots that feel more like poster art than catalog images. My e-commerce clients used to consider that kind of work out of scope.

Blending Photos and Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter
Video Tutorials

Blending Photos and Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter

Last month I was three days into a campaign for a Chicago ad agency that wanted product shots with an illustrated, graphic-novel-esque feel. Clean photography married to hand-drawn-style overlays, vintage textures, dramatic shadows that didn’t exist on set. My compositing workflow handled the heavy lifting, but I kept hitting friction at the illustration integration stage. The blending felt mechanical. The lighting lied. I knew the gap between what I was producing and what the client was imagining, and I didn’t love that gap.