An example of Photoshop manipulation
This page shows how much one can do with Adobe Photoshop (and the associated Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) these days.
Here is an image I took at Mom's 70th birthday party (April 2009). It was taken about three seconds after the image before it and the flash had not had time to "recycle" and hence the flash did not fire at all—the picture was far too dark. Here is a resized version of the JPEG image as it came out of the camera:

Fortunately, I shot in a mode ("RAW+JPEG") which gives me a "RAW" image where one has a lot more control to fix things. So, I made a massive exposure shift (equivalent to increasing exposure 13 times!) in the RAW image and saved it as another version. This is really "noisy" (notice the green speckles and horizontal banding throughout the image) but salvages an otherwise unusable photo.

Sheryl liked this photo as a choice to use on the 50th wedding anniversary invitation (as the "Now" of "Then.. and ...Now" pair). But there were other elements, such as Adam, looking on and smiling (partially blocked). So I sampled the color of the background screen and painted him out:

I then figured that this plain background looked too plain. (Every panel had a painting, it's just that Adam was blocking one.) So I copied a vase from another part of the background screen and pasted in as much as would fit:

At this point, I cropped it into a feathered oval for Sheryl's purposes and adjusted colors and contrast to minimize the noise.

Only then I noticed two other visual elements and quickly painted over them, too: Part of Sophie's head and Mom's fork!

And all of that yielded the final image used for the invitation:

David Friedlander
28 August 2009