Tag Archives: Photo Editing

Pima Air and Space Museum Wright Brother’s Exhibit Design

Pima Air and Space Museum had a full size replica of the Wright Flyer with a stack of old photos and were needing the museum graphics designed for their exhibit. This project was thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end. A museum exhibit? In my family, every vacation had us stopping at state and national parks along the way, with extra stops at pretty much any museum we could find. Did you know there is a firehouse museum in downtown San Diego? Sure, everyone else goes to San Diego for the beaches… okay, back to the story. The great guys over at PASM had already designed the stand to hold the aircraft, and I needed to create the graphics to showcase the aircraft. It stands just inside the main doors to the exhibits, the first plane you will see when you walk in. What better imagery to use than the plane just lifting into the air in the middle of the dunes, two brothers out to prove that man could fly. Colorize it a bit to warm it up and it became a wonderful centerpiece to the exhibit.

Their story and photos complete the rest of the exhibit, all with a scratchy background of antique paper and imagery. Below is the rear of the exhibit with a copy of the motor used as well as a cross section of the wing to help explain how the brothers turned their plane by warping the wings.

Part of the exhibit on the left hand side, presumably for reconditioning.

Quick Wedding Photo Editing

My friend Travis over at Travis Williams Photography [nice logo, btw] recently contacted me about a wedding he had just shot. The bride and groom had a 15″ height difference, which seemed normal to me as my wife and I have a 14″ difference. The problem was that in shuffling the family around for their wedding photos, he had the bride and the groom on the top step which would be completely normal except the height difference with the rest of the family came out looking unbalanced. Could I fix it? Sure, that would be easy. I wasn’t going to have to do anything difficult in Photoshop other than make a hole where the groom once existed and slide a copy of groom down a bit and clean it up a bit. You could do the same thing with a photograph in the magazine, but this was a wedding photo. No do-overs on taking these photos.

Here is the couple by themselves, which will be normal because that is their normal difference in height.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

And then as a family. Just by looking at the lengths of their arms, I wouldn’t think anyone is over 5’7″, and being a step down doesn’t help. Sort of makes the groom look like an NBA center.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

With a few minutes of editing, I masked out the image, removing the groom and leaving the family.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

I dropped the groom down a bit on and cleaned up the area where he used to be and it worked out fine.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

Even though the mother’s shadow had dropped down a bit, it still looked believable as there aren’t any other shadows to make hers look poorly offset. To fix the shadow, that would have taken a lot more work, and it wouldn’t have been noticeable unless there was a smart CSI checking out the photo. The groom does look a little out of place – his body proportions don’t match up, making his torso seem short and his legs too long. Time to crop the photo to remove the legs on everyone.

wedding photo edited in Photoshop

And with that, there is now a great wedding photo made better with a little image editing in Photoshop. I’ll post some difficult photo editing projects another time.