The San Francisco 49ers recently revamped an office exhibit featuring approximately 130 photos of award-winning players past and present. Because the photos spanned several decades they were an interesting testament to the various trends in sports photography over the years: halos, dramatic lighting, grass backgrounds and other old school effects were all heavily represented. And while they were undoubtedly the height of cool at the time, they are now collectively pretty dated, which didn’t work well for this particular display wall.
LLB Designs was asked to work some Photoshop magic with the goal of putting each headshot on a consistent gray background with uniform coloring. 130+ photos makes for a lot of Photoshop time and as anyone that has every tried it knows clipping around hair while keeping it natural looking is pretty tough. But it was amusing to see how the players’ hair styles have changed through time (let’s just say it wasn’t only ladies feathering their hair in the 80’s) and of course it was great fun to work with throwback photos of the likes of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice.
