Bert Monroy's "Damen" Digital Painting
Bert Monroy has created what is very likely the largest Photoshop file ever. Photo-realistic in detail, his panorama of the Damen Station on the Blue Line of the Chicago Transit Authority weighs in at 1.7 GB (flattened) and took close to 2,000 hours to create over the course of a year. The thumbnail shown here is just a tiny segment of the complete painting.Bert used Adobe Illustrator to create the basic shapes and the buildings in the Chicago skyline, and the painting was finished in Photoshop. The final image is 40 inches by 120 inches. It's made up of roughly 50 individual Photoshop files, 15,000 layers, 500 alpha channels, and 250,000 paths. Wow!
I'm sure Bert Monroy learned enough to write quite a few new Photoshop books after that project! If you'd like to learn more about his techniques, check out Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy, where he reveals his process for creating amazing photo-realistic fine art. You can also read more about the Damen panorama from his Web site, but be warned... it took over 5 minutes for me to load the page on a high-speed connection.
On this site:
• Book Review: Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy
• Digital Art Techniques and Tutorials
• Photorealism with Bert Monroy Video Workshop
• "Hamburgers" by Bert Monroy ©2002
[via CreativeGuy]
Image Credit: © Bert Monroy 2006
Comments
While I can admire the dedication that went into creating this awesome piece of work I can’t help thinking “taking a picture would have been a lot simpler!” LOL I think two months and 5 or 6 layers was the most dedicated I’ve ever been to a single graphics project.
I was excited to see the “largest photoshop file ever” because I was expecting to see a 20 or 30 GB file. The illustration is beautiful, but I have to say that unfortunately, it isn’t the largest Photoshop file.
Back in 2000, I was an employee at a company called Mega Art in New York City, we made those enormous, wall-sized photographs for The Gap, Banana Republic, Showtime Networks and others. Back then, if you had seen a wallscape that took up the entire side of a building, chances are that we made it. (I think the company is now called Nomad World Wide.)
The biggest murals were printed onto vinyl mesh using a 16-foot-wide electrostatic printer called a Nur Blueboard. My job was to prepare the files in Photoshop and Illustrator.
One particular wallscape stood out in its hugeness. It was a 150-foot by 250-foot mural for Old Navy, to be hung over a building in San Francisco. Even though the file was effectively only 6-12 dpi, it was nearly 6 GB in size. This was back before OSX and the G5, and Photoshop had a 20,000 pixel limit. So I had to feed the 6 GB file in pieces that were each about 1.8 GB each to the Blueboard operators. I remember I started that job (along with a Showtime job) at 2 in the afternoon, and I worked straight until 6 pm the NEXT DAY without getting out of that chair for more than a few minutes to either use the restroom or load up on food from the vending machine. Those 28 hours flew by like I was in a trance, it felt like 28 minutes, almost as if I stepped into a time-machine.
And that was the largest Photoshop file on which I had ever worked.