Being His Girl

Are you her girl, or his?

This was a fun image to cap.  The original image just spoke to me quick and easy.  I saw a man dressed up (pure cross dressing) for his wife, but some guy (her boyfriend? her bull? his friend?...) had taken a liking to him dressed as her and wanted to use him as a girl.  I mean, nothing complicated or anything, just a straightforward humiliation story.  Right in my sweet spot.  

It wasn't until after I had written the tumblr and posted it there did I realize this is Keira Knightley.  It must just be the angle in this photo as she honestly, at first look, doesn't seem to have breasts at all!  

Anyway, I wrote it up as a tumblr and posted it.  I liked it.  You can see the tumblr version here.  But it was a striking enough image, and I enjoyed the story enough, that I wanted to present it as a cap.  Now, I knew from the outset that this was going to be tough.  I didn't hold back on the story and it was on the long side, especially for a one off image.  And the image itself wasn't all that big, so I couldn't just go with a smaller font and let people zoom in.  But it was still worth the try. 

My first attempt was to vastly cut the story down.  Trim it without taking away any particular point.  Once I had that, I laid it out in my standard format.  Just like the cap I ended up with, it'd be a single box on the right as that would allow her face and the title to be the anchor on the left.  But even cut down as it was, the story was short in that format by two full paragraphs.  Not seeing any way I could cut more, I went into a more old school direction of making the text box a less than standard shape.  I'd take advantage of the space below her face.  And initially, it worked.  To see how it'd look I just copied the underlying text box, turned it on its side, and resized it.  I then deleted the last paragraph, and put it (as well as the two paragraphs that hadn't fit before) into the new longer text box.  Here's what it looked like once I had the text boxes enlarged to fit the text:

It's not bad, but it's a far way away from good.  First, I'd have to draw the box from scratch as it had an outline that wouldn't work with one box over the other.  Plus the curves where the boxes meet would look horrendous if I didn't start over.  But I was unhappy with it in other ways.  To get it this far I had cut out almost all of the model.  Sure, Keira's face is beautiful enough to carry it, especially with her lips made up like that, but I even made sure to mention her gloves and now you just couldn't see them.  I tried to find the photo set (that's when I found out it was Keira) but saw quickly that this was a one of one image.  Not a set.  The story wouldn't have really worked split up with two images of her, but now it wasn't even an option.  I also was going to have to work heavily with the last few paragraphs as the lines just didn't match up.  That's editing an edited story on the fly inside of Photoshop (instead of my preferred MS Word).  

I figured that might be worth a try, especially if I could maybe cut down the story a bit more.  But my breaking point was when I tried to read the story as is inside the Photoshop image.  I actually had to zoom in.  If I have to do it, I'd expect others would have to do it and that's zooming in beyond 100% to be legible.  Nope, we're done here.  

I thought briefly of giving up and just having it on tumblr, but I'd already invested quite a bit of time into this and I still felt positively about the story and image being a cap.  So I did the only thing possible... I started with a clean slate using the original post as inspiration but not the full story.  I was shooting for a three paragraph story but would accept it being four paragraphs figuring it could fit fine and be a large enough font to be legible.  

And I'm actually surprised as I'm not disappointed by it.  It worked.  I put it into the original text box, changed it from that horrid yellow/gold to a nice lipsticky red, added my watermark, and then went to add the title.  That's about my biggest disappointment as the urge to post this was now far greater than the creative urge to make it wonderful.  The title is meh and in all honesty spoils the ending but it didn't sound bad (the idea of having the 'her' crossed out seemed fun) and looked pretty good.  

Lemme know what you think.  Especially if you read all three versions.  Which works best; the original tumblr, the trimmed version (in the one with the gold boxes), or the final cap version (red boxes).