When Kourosh Sootodeh was asked by the folks at Kahlua to create an image for their Holiday ad campaign he came to me to help make it happen.

The basic idea was to shoot the girl wearing holiday themed sweater holding drinks made with Kahlua liqueur. Easy enough, right?

But as it turned out getting a sweater made with the chosen pattern was not possible. That’s where the Photoshop Magic came in!

Kourosh shot the model wearing a plan beige sweater in various positions, sometimes holding glasses and sometimes with her arms down as shown here.

Then taking the pattern provided by the client I used some tricks to apply this pattern (shown below) to the sweater making it look like this was on the sweater she was wearing all the time.

This challenge was a fun one. Adding the pattern to the sweater the girl is wearing requires more than just sizing and warping. You have to bring back all the lighting which gives the sweater shape and dimensionality so it fits her body in a believable way. In some ways the solution was similar to a previous job I had worked on for Nike, creating custom shoes based on basic gray shoes and swatches of Pendleton fabric, basically using the base shot itself to supply the lighting and shape. And that’s one of the cool things about working on shots like this, we get the chance to reach deep into our bag of tricks while coming up with a new twist to pull off some magic.

The shot was finished off by adding in her smile (from another shot) as well as her arms holding the glasses.

Happy Holidays!