Visual Interest: Struzan Rebalancing MIDTONES

I wanted to continue to study Struzan more and more to find out why his renderings are so dynamic and flow so well in compositions with shape welding. So I decided to treat photoshop like a Struzan’s physical process. Drew Struzan always starts out with a “comp” or comprehensive drawing. It’s usually only 3 tones: black, midtone, highlight. That’s it. And it’s followed through to the final poster rendering. Two examples of his comps using 3 values to construct the shape welding composition and flow:

Notice how simplified the facial values are

EXAMPLE 1

So I decided to reverse engineer this process. I took the final colored image, found the source photo, and posterized the image to 3 values in photoshop to only show the blacks, midtones and highlights. By doing this, we can see how Struzan rebalances faces to have less ratio of highlights and more of a midtone wash. This helps highlights pop more with definition

EXAMPLE 2

More midtone flattening in the face:

EXAMPLE 3

In this poster, Struzan washed out the shadows in the original with midtones and jacked up the highlights