Imagic 1545 No. Wilcox Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90028 phone 323-461-78766 fax 323-464-2978 www.imagicla.com	CONTACT FOR RETOUCHING SERVICES: David Overturf, sales manager, davido@imagicla.com OTHER PRINCIPALS: Paul Elmi, president, paule@imagicla.com Tim Wild, partner, retoucher	HOURLY RATES: Per job PRIMARY EQUIPMENT: Mac G4 studio SPEED OF TURNAROUND: “If we get days, we’re lucky. Very fast turnaround. Overnight.”

IMAGIC

Founded as both a photo lab and traditional retouching studio, Imagic has made a smooth foray into digital retouching. The studio is best known for its entertainment industry work, producing posters and key promotional art for Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and others; it also does a good amount of work on ad campaigns and for fine-art photographers. Among its 32 employees, the studio staffs half a dozen retouchers.

Recently, Imagic produced key art for the film The Bourne Identity, working with L.A.-based design group Crew Creative Advertising and Stewart Huey at Universal Pictures Marketing. The image would be used for the movie’s promotional posters, print and outdoor ads, and the like.

In a typical scenario for movie studio art, Imagic received a comp prepared by Crew Creative, seen and approved by Universal’s marketing group. Imagic’s brief was to retain the design, integrity and color of the approved art while stepping up the quality. “They come with a mock-up,” retoucher Doug Reichert explains, “a rough version of what they want. Our job is to make it look really good, at a size usable for print.”

So Imagic took the low-res comp file, produced in Photoshop, and blew it up to final working size. Reichert began replacing the low-res elements with higher-quality ones. For this film, the artwork was centered on the figure of Matt Damon, framed by inset action photos around the top and right and by a big thumbprint in the background and a crosshair target in the middle. Reichert scanned in a bunch of transparencies among the dozen elements needed for the art, manipulating and color-correcting each element till it worked.

Paul Elmi notes that Photoshop-trained retouchers are a dime a dozen, but Imagic’s retouchers are doubly trained as illustrators, which came in handy for The Bourne Identity poster. In it, Damon is carrying a handgun, which was too blurry in the original shot. So Reichert replaced it with a 3-D hand and gun to show detail. He explained, “I used a free gun model I found, and a cheapo, low-end 3-D program called Poser. In this case, it provided what I needed. I composited the element into the main poster to bring the detail through.”

Reichert says these projects can be challenging because once the studio executive, art director and creative director sign off on the rough, they don’t want anything to deviate, especially not the colors. So a good amount of time is spent color-correcting. “That’s always the most difficult thing,” he says. “Compositing parts are straightforward—put the head on the body at the right size and the right angle. But color is the most time-consuming.”

— John Courtmanche