Family Transformation

Friday, July 19, 2002

Digital photography has many advantages:

  1. Instant results
  2. Great quality
  3. No printing costs
  4. Continuous feedback for trial and error

One more feature becomes invaluable when taking photos of groups of people:

For example, here is a photo I took of some friends of ours:

Four of the seven people have great smiles, and are looking a the camera. However, the boy in the red shirt is looking off somewhere else, the young man in the back right has a crazy smile, and the young lady in the back right has her eyes closed. No problem, take more pictures, right? Well, I took several, and never got one where everybody looked good. Perhaps that has something to do with my photographic skill, but I do have some software and some computer skills!

I took good clips from the other photos, and pasted them into this mostly good image. First, get the boy looking at the camera:

 

And get some better expressions in the back row:

 

It helps if all the different photos have the same exposure, position, etc. - the more differences the more difficult the match.

To fix the boy up front, I copied his good face, faded out the border, pasted it on top of the face looking elsewhere, rotated it slightly, and had it in place.

To get the pair in the back, I copied their good faces (fortunately both in one shot), faded the edge of the clip, and pasted them over the not-so-good one. This was a little more trouble, and the replacement photo was a tad bit darker, and that was noticeable. So, a little smudging and cloning later, and here's the result:

 

 

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