A Softer Image

Barbara and Solomon needed a photo to use on their thank-you notes, but many of the photos of dances and special events during their day included large elements in the foreground that weren’t ideal for a photo card. They wanted something that reflected the joyous and celebratory emotion of the day, and really wanted to use a photo of the Hora:

As you can see, we’d like to see more of Solomon. So I dug around through the rest of our Hora photos and found this:

I took his legs from this photo and composited them into the original photo. Again, what you need to make this work is a good base photo, but also you need to have very close light levels in the two photos so you can match them well. If you use different exposures in pictures you are compositing, it becomes much more difficult to blend them together. Here’s our result:

I darkened the rest of the image to highlight Barbara and Solomon more as well. Next week we’ll talk more about exactly how to do the retouching in Photoshop. Stay tuned for more samples this week!