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Suzuki is a name that many of us associate with high performance motorbikes but the company has steadily been gaining a presence in the popular four-wheel drive and B/C sector of the car market, with year on year sales growing by nearly 20 per cent.
Some of that success must be down to the creative efforts of its advertising agency Nexus/H. The Tunbridge Wells-based agency has annual billings of £17 million, an office in Paris and ambitious plans to expand further into Europe this year. Specialising in brand communications 'through the line', the agency provides a full service in-house, from creative work through to media buying and telemarketing.
The desire to manage as much as possible in house is the reason that for the last year all high-resolution image composition and retouching has been performed on site using G3 Macs with Adobe Photoshop. Before this, work was sent out to various London specialist retouching houses, a process that wasn't always straightforward, as head of creative services manager John Reynolds recalls:
"Our people would produce a low-resolution concept, then we'd give that and the trannies to the retouching house and say 'now replicate it'. The job could go back and forth several times, taking days or even weeks."
It took the arrival of the G3 Macintosh to make this kind of work feasible in-house at Nexus/H - with a typical finished flattened image size of between 80 and 100MB and layered work-in-progress Photoshop file sizes of up to a gigabyte it wasn't a job for underpowered hardware.
The benefits of bringing this kind of high-end retouching in-house don't stop at faster turnaround or getting a closer match to the brief. Because ideas can be realised more quickly, there's time for more creative experimentation too.
"There's an ad for the New Wagon R+ which came out at the end of April that has a completely created cityscape [see image]," says Reynolds. "We wouldn't have considered trying to create something like that if we'd had to pay typical London prices to have it done the old way and couldn't control the modifications ourselves."
"It's raised our creativity - the sky's the limit now," agrees senior graphic systems artist David Turfitt. "If the creative department can have the idea, we can realise it for them."
Features in Photoshop 5 that particularly help Turfitt and his colleague Daniel Tero bring it all to life are the history palette, transform paths and layer masks. The program's flexibility is such that the two might use completely different tools and approaches to achieve the same end result, such as changing the colour of a vehicle from gold to silver, for example.
Photoshop bodyshop
It's not just wild flights of fantasy that Photoshop makes possible, putting cars into exotic and unlikely locations or driving a six lane highway through a fictitious city centre. There are some intensely practical problems that the program overcomes as well - the cars that are supplied for photography can be pre-production models, the wrong colour or Japanese versions with inappropriate trim, bumpers or wheels. Sometimes they're so secret that they can't even be photographed outdoors, which gives Reynold's team interesting problems like how to get reflections of tall buildings in the paintwork when the vehicle is actually inside a photographer's studio .
"With Photoshop we reduce costs, save time and increase our creativity," summarises Reynolds. All of which adds up to a better service to the client, so next time you spot a Suzuki ad look closely - you won't see the joins.
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