I think it was Wayne Gretzky who said that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Luckily this isn’t always true today.
After delivering photos to a couple this past week the happy couple contacted me with a request of an additional photo, the request was a formal photo of the bride with her parents. This shot was not originally down in the formal shot list (which I help the couple create prior to the day) but was a shot that the bride wanted for the album.
First I checked my rejected photos in case I had rejected one for other reasons, nothing. My only hope was to suggest to the couple that I could edit one of the photos to essentially remove the groom to create the photo they wanted, which they agreed.
For this I work I used Photoshop CC out of Lightroom then back into Lightroom to do some final editing.
This is the original image which I used as my base image to edit…
Before
I started lassoing the groom and deleting with content aware fill as start, next was to lasso the brides mother and move her across and delete some of her which now appears behind the bride. When the layering was complete and her mother appeared behind the bride I burnt in some shadow between them and added some slight drop shadow/feathering to soften the cut out. Next was to clone and rebuild the entire gap that the brides mother had left behind and remove all traces of the groom that she replaced.
After
Yes there are some discrepancies, the edge of the step is missing and some of the stonework doesn’t make sense (but does the rest of the stonework make sense anyway?), but I think overall it looks pretty good and believable and most importantly the couple were extremely happy with the final image. I will post up some images from this wedding very soon, keep checking the blog for this update.
So Wayne, that’s not strictly true today with help of Photoshop.
Thanks.
Phil.
That is a great piece of creativity, very impressive. If you dropped that photo into an album I am sure no one would pick it out as being any different.