The wedding shot

The pose in question

This bit of photo manipulation came as something of a surprise. This was not something I had been asked to do before.

The bride’s mother was embarrassed by her husband, because he wasn’t ready for the shot. The resulting photograph, definitely wasn’t what had been intended.

The photographer took the shot when the husband wasn’t quite ready, catching him in a less than perfect position.

The question then was, could I fix it?

Of course I could.

However, this was not a simple task and required thought. Both the father’s legs had to be repostioned to give him the right pose. The arm did too.

The photo manipulation

So, I used photo manipulation techniques to cut both limbs out of the picture, rotate them and correct the suit to look right.

I did the same to the arm, so that didn’t look awful, including air brushing out some of the highlights to take away where the sun caught the top of his arm.

With the arm and legs repositioned, the background had to be corrected. Areas where the legs had been had left holes in the background.

These needed to be recreated. It wasn’t much, just a little patio and lawn. On top of that, in the original photo, the train of the bride’s dress was in shadow where the father’s leg and foot were. The original shadow needed to be erased and and a new one created where the foot and leg now were.

All told, for such an apparently “simple” exercise, there was more to think about than it appeared on the surface.

All parties were well pleased with the end result though and that’s what matters.