When I first installed Photoshop on my PC, my initial intention was to do things that could be done in a dark room. My flat at the time didn’t have enough space to set up an actual darkroom. At the time, I thought that I could do most of the things I could do in a dark room with a film scanner and this software. It didn’t take very long for me that in a digital “darkroom,” a person can easily surpass what is achievable in a conventional darkroom.

Now fast forward 21 years; I do freelance photography editing work (I like to call independent visual post-production work); I receive all kinds of requests. Most of the time, photographers and ad agencies have a good grasp of what is achievable in a digital darkroom, but now and then, I receive requests next to impossible. I’m not counting the demands we see on TV series or movies, which I can summarize as enhancement requests. Of course, these are not possible; if an image is very blurred, we can’t just make it camera sharp. I would have told you that it’s impossible though Google has some papers, and they are working on AI solutions to remedy such issues.

A few months back, I started communicating with Jake Dennis, a commercial photographer from New Zealand. He had quite an exciting project; he had shot a campaign for Go Car, a national car leasing-financing company. Their aim to make things fun and who doesn’t like dogs. They wanted to make a dog drive a convertible car.

Client: Monday Night Brewery

In January 2020, I have been contacted by Monday Night Brewery based in Atlanta, USA. They had a new line of hard seltzer coming up and needed a visual to show the line in a single image.

The initial brief image was as follows: