For a magazine project I am working on now, I had to update a photograph of our board members, to reflect changes that have occurred since the original photograph was taken.
The original photo was shot in 2007, I believe. Even then, not all of the then-current board members were available at the time of the photo shoot. I arranged for one of my coworkers, Kenton Rogers, to take one photo without the missing members, who were added later when they were able to come and sit for a photo.
The original photo:
Kenton later added the missing members:
Unfortunately, that edited version was never published, because we had to postpone publishing the magazine into which it would have been inserted.
This year we started working on the magazine again. However, the members of the board had changed over the years. We could not get everyone together for another photo shoot, so we had to update the photo that we already had. It was necessary to remove four members, and add one. But since the photo had not been taken with that end in mind, this step was a little more difficult.
Besides the four deletions and one insertion, it was necessary to move other members to fill the gaps, add missing body parts to the people thus moved, and fill in backgrounds where they had been cut out. (Computer novices may imagine that if you move a person in Photoshop, their hand that was hidden behind a piece of furniture will magically appear, and you will see what was behind them. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. All those things have to be drawn, cloned, or otherwise added.)
The updated version for 2009:
It’s not a perfect arrangement, aesthetically. But considering what we had to work with, I think it turned out pretty well!
Tags: 3ABN, graphic design, photography, Photoshop
The more I read your stories about photo manipulation the more certain I am that I cannot believe anything that I see!!!
Oh… wow. Please don’t tell anybody else this is actually possible. Because we almost had to do this at our office recently…