Saddington & Baynes Studio 3 21 Wren Street London WC1X oHF England Telephone: +44 20 7833 3032 Fax: +44 20 7837 1942 www.sb-showcase.com info@sb-showcase.com	PRIMARY EQUIMPENT: Three Silicon Graphics dual processor Octanes running Barco Creator 7.2; ICG 370i drum scanner; Macs running Photoshop and Quark; FTP file transfer of finished RGB/CMYK data at 2 mb per second via high-speed SDSL line; LightJet for transparency output. HOURLY RATES: Per project. PRINCIPAL PARTNERS: Richard Baynes, director	SAMPLE CLIENTS: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Fallon McElligott, Carmichael Lynch, Leo Burnett, TBWA\Chiat Day, Young & Rubicam, Merkley Newman Harty, Rubin Postaer, Wieden + Kennedy (70 percent of the work is for American agencies) CONTACT FOR RETOUCHING SERVICES Chris Christodoulou, studio manager and head of post-production, s.b@easynet.co.uk

SADDINGTON & BAYNES

	© Petit Bateau / photos by John Offenbach

Never work with children or animals was advice that photographer John Offenbach ignored. Fortunately, digital postproduction saved the day.

Photographer John Offenbach and ad agency BETC Euro RSCG in Paris approached Saddington & Baynes to help create a print campaign for French children’s clothing company Petit Bateau. The concept? Create a wide, expansive, colorful image of a couple hundred children playing in a city plaza, a master image that would be large and clear enough to allow the client to also zoom in on any group of children within to create ancillary ads. Lead retoucher Chris Christodoulou explains, “The image would form the client’s entire advertising for the year. The client wanted the facility to zoom in and print a tiny section of the image as a large poster or magazine spread.” In other words, the final image had to contain a lot of detail, the final digital file, a lot of information.

Before the shoot, Christodoulou reviewed Offenbach’s mock layout as they planned the image and addressed anticipated issues. The photographer planned to use more than 50 child models in all, posing them in groups of 20 to produce ten original pictures for compositing in postproduction. Christodoulou explains, “The logistical problems of trying to get a very large group of children to do exactly what they were told simultaneously made this project heavily dependent on retouching.” During the shoot, Offenbach learned just how much of a logistical problem the children were. Christodoulou said that during the shoot the large groups of children weren’t doing what Offenbach wanted, at least not all at the same time, so the photographer switched gears and posed the children in groups of two, three and four. The result? More than 100 original images.

Offenbach turned the originals over to Christodoulou, who together with freelance retoucher Ken Back set about the task of compositing them all into one, on a six-day deadline. Because the master image needed to be so detailed, Offenbach had shot the background image of the empty plaza as two 10 x 8 transparency sheets. Using Barco Creator software, the retouchers first spliced the two images together in the middle, correcting for lens distortion on either ends of each piece of film and seamlessly lining up the plaza’s marble tiling. The retouchers found Creator’s distortion-correcting tools essential, particularly its four-point perspective tool. The distortion on the background images would be just the beginning though.

Before placing any of the child images on the plaza background, the retouchers organized the elements, giving a letter or name to each child and marking up the originals by roughly sketching where each child would go. The retouchers also planned their approach, deciding to extensively use the software’s “paste reset” command. Christodoulou elaborates, “Working on an image of that size, you don’t want to have to constantly zoom in and out to the section you need. In Barco you can cut out a small section of the picture, work on it, and when finished, stick it back in.” The paste reset command remembers the origin point of what was cut out. So the retouchers cut the background into pieces, placed the groups of children onto the pieces where they belonged, then pasted the retouched piece back into the background.

The retouchers strove to retain the integrity of each of the original images, and not to cut and paste the children in a way that edges of their hair or their shadows or other subtle motion would be lost. Rather than making masks, the retouchers spent time positioning each image in its correct place on the empty plaza, which was tricky: The children were shot on 2 1/4 transparency, which distorts a picture differently than the larger film used for the background. As the retouchers placed each group of children into place, they had to correct the perspective and line up the kids exactly as if the image were shot as one master. In addition to the the four-point perspective tool, they also used the “warp” tool, which allowed them to set up a grid and pull points around until the image or a section of it fit properly. Then, anywhere the distortion tools were used, the retouchers also had to use grain tools to correct for softening of the grain.

“Our real aim was for people to stare at the image for hours and never see an edge, never see mask lines,” Christodoulou says. “Our main concern was for people to never know how it’d been done.”

The retouchers also had to make choices for each group of kids; for instance, if in a picture of four children, one of them was making an odd face, the retouchers had to find a better shot of that one child for replacement.

Finally, as each of the originals was placed on the background, it had to be color-corrected to match the plaza. The retouchers used Barco’s selective color correction tool, which enabled them to pick out an individual section of color and change it without having to mask it. This allowed them, for example, to color-correct just the children in a shot without affecting the background.

In all, perhaps the most challenging aspect of the project was its 100-scan scope. “In my 13 years as a retoucher. I don’t believe I’ve composed an image with more originals,” Christodoulou says, adding he was grateful to be using a system built on Silicon Graphics hardware, whose stability was vital for the speed and intensity of the project. Not to mention its size: the final RGB file was 1,068 megabytes, “by far the largest file I’ve ever retouched,” Christodoulou says.


— John Courtmanche