The Wedding Photographs
These two images were shot at a wedding back in 1966. Apparently the short chap in glasses at the front insisted on being in many of the photographs; yes, ‘photobombing’ existed even in the 60s! Might it be possible to remove him and the young boy from the images?
This was an interesting bit of retouching as it involved not only re-using some of the information available in the images but also bringing new information to the party and making it look as though it was all shot at the same time. Some of that information, such as the bride’s mother’s eyes and the belt on her dress, from one photograph was used in the other to help in the reconstruction.
Normally, when doing a photo retouch, one would remove any dust and scratch marks from the image but, in this particular case, I decided that it would be helpful to keep them to make it less obvious that this was a fairly major retouch. I could have used the suit of the man in front to recreate the suit of the man at the back but, as the suits were of different styles I decided that a new suit had to be sourced for him. In order to make it tie in I added some dust and scratches to this part of the image to ‘age’ the photograph. At this point the suit was very slightly blurred to blend it in with the very slightly ‘soft’ original.
