Recreating Childhood Memories With Photoshop

When word gets out about your Photoshop skills, you start getting asked to do some pretty fun projects!

Case in point. At our recent Christmas gathering my dad's cousin, Don, (making him my first cousin once removed?) asked if I could help him with a Photoshop project. His 35 year anniversary was coming up and he wanted to surprise his wife, Debbie (who is 9-years his junior), with a funny gift. With a twinkle in his eye he told me how he frequently jokes with her about how creepy it would have been if he had asked her to his senior prom!

The project? Photoshop his senior high school portrait with an image of her from the same year so he could "take her to prom." I told him that I "might" be able to help and that it depends on the photos.

You can see the original images Don sent in the animated gif that goes with this post (below).

The first thing I noticed is that the images had a slightly different tone. So right away I turned both images to straight black and white so they would balance better.

I then created an outline png file of Don so I could easily import and move him around.

My initial thought about compositing the two shots together was to try and Photoshop Don's face on one of the gentleman's bodies in Debbie's original photo. That was a no go...Don's head position is pretty dramatic in his senior photo and I discovered quite quickly it simply wasn't going to work.

So I pondered the conundrum a bit.

I figured if I could cut them both out and place them onto a neutral background I could make it work.

So I zoomed into the wood paneled wall in Debbie's photo to crop her and the men out and did some additional work to create a "person free," wood panel background. I then outlined and cut Debbie out from the original photo and placed her on the newly created wood panel background. Next Don's outlined images got dropped in...

I had to move each of them around a bit and experiment with flipping their images to find a somewhat natural placement of them together. One of the major challenges was their eyes...they are both looking different directions and I wanted to make sure their gazes weren't off too drastically.

The next challenge was the lighting of the shots. Don's photo was professionally lit while Debbie's had a hard flash creating a dramatic difference between their highlights. I played with the levels, highlights, contrast, and curves of both of their images to help create a bit more evenness between the two. I also added a light sepia tone and vignette to the final composite which helped tone down the lighting differences.

While obviously you can still tell the final image is Photoshopped it came together much better than I thought! But most importantly, Don was thrilled with the final product and Debbie found the gift wonderfully humorous and cute!

If you have a photo project like Don's that you've wanted to do, please let me know! Just drop an email to christy.e.b.rice@gmail.com. I'll take a look and provide an estimate.