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.
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.
With a few minutes of editing, I masked out the image, removing the groom and leaving the family.
I dropped the groom down a bit on and cleaned up the area where he used to be and it worked out fine.
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.
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.