photoshopped

[SmartWombat]

I had the job of photographing our UK development team for the Belgian company magazine.
But one person was only in on Monday and then not returning until after the print deadline.
So I had to do a little creative editing.
The original wasn't quite straight-on.
So it needed to be de-skewed.
Then colour corrected to the group shot.
I used the wall outside the office main entrance, I had the poster of "the usual suspects" in mind.

I thought I could sent the two shots over to the marketing team and they'd photoshop it.
Oh no, they had no one who could do it technically, and their agency didn't either !

So I spend my lunch hour on a quick edit.
The wall helped me establish the correct scale and positioning the individual shot in the group scene, I wanted something to enable me to match the two images.
Then after colour matching and scaling, the hard work began !
Many layers later, there's the corrected group shot.
Replace the big window with new wall, recolour the sunlight off the paving, layer the leftmost person forward, as he's standing at an angle.
Insert the missing person behind his arm, and then clean up the edges pixel by pixel.
A few extra shadows on the wall to match the group, and around the feet.
Keen observers will notice I cloned in smiles from other shots onto the final poses.

I think if you look carefully at 1:1 you may be able to see the joins.
But not when printed on an A4 page.

Result !