Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Ming, Nopi, Princey, and Teddy! My wife wanted to get a picture like this in one shot. That plan was ambitious, but I knew it would be pretty much impossible. If we had had 4 people helping us, then maybe it could have been done. But . . . a hat would fall off, the cats wouldn’t sit still, Princey would put his head down, Teddy would get bored and wander off, etc. So, in the end, I had to do this in Photoshop.
One shot was of Princey and Teddy together. A second picture was of Nopi with my wife holding her and preventing her from running off, and a third image was of Ming. Ming wasn’t happy, though, about posing, and his eyes were narrow slits. So, I ‘borrowed’ his open eyes from another picture I’d taken of him previously and replaced the closed eyes. That’s the fourth component. The Santa hat on Ming at the far left is a fifth photograph, and the bow on the front of Ming is a sixth element. The background is a set of antique teak doors from Indonesia, and they were only wide enough to cover half the background. So, I had to extend them to hide the white wall on the right half of the frame. To select Ming and Nopi for the composite work, I used Topaz Mask AI because of the hair involved.
Finally, if you look carefully on the right side (our right) of Ming’s face, you can see four whiskers that extend beyond his green sweater. Topaz Mask AI didn’t retain those in the selection; they were originally cut off because they are so fine. So, working at 600% magnification, I used the pen tool to select one individual whisker on the left side of Ming’s face. I then copied that to the clipboard, pasted it into the photo, flipped it horizontally, rotated it, and moved it into place. I repeated this process three more times to extend the whiskers on the right side beyond the green sweater to their correct length.
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