TopSail 120” Magazine Ad

The TopSail 120” top was a new product from the RedDot line. This top was advertised in a publication in early 2022 and we wanted to do something creative to show it off. The challenge with this top is very thin, so we only had one true angle to show the product without it being installed on the cart: top down. Everything in this ad was custom-composited with Photoshop to create a visually compelling composition.

Here’s a list of the separate pieces that were put together to make this ad:

• TopSail 120” product shot - edited to look more uniform and clean, liquified to make the canvas sit evenly inside the frame, and reworked for environment lighting.

• Beach image - color corrected and transformed to sit right in the composition and to match environmental lighting.

• Shadow - The shadow was created by taking a selection of the side profile of a golf cart, and converting it to a smart layer where I could mask the blur with a gradient. That way, the shadow is less blurry the closer it gets to the cart. Then, I warped it to follow the environmental light and adjusted some blend modes to make it look natural.

• Tire tracks - To make these, I took a selection of tire tread and made it a brush so that I could draw in the path the cart took to get in that position. This brush stroke was set to 50% gray. After that, I embossed the brushed layers individually and set the blend mode to overlay so it would only show the darker and lighter portions of the brush and it would look raised and lowered. I added slight shadows to enhance the effect.

• Typography - The type is set below the top to make it look like the top is above the type. I also added a small embossing effect to make it look more of a part of the world.