I love making our goofy holiday card each year, and this year Christine and I had a blast putting it together. What you may not realize though is just how many takes were shot to get just the right images to merge together. Below is a video showing the outtakes, some notes on how it was done, as well as the final product.

So without further adieu, crank up your volume, sit back, click, and enjoy! Note, after the video starts you can adjust the video quality using the options at the lower right (best viewed at 1080).

For this card, Photoshop was a must...really, I'm taller than that :) The mantle/fireplace I shot in  natural light, and then for Christine and myself, I setup two Paul Buff Einsteins: one was setup with a 43" bounce umbrella for key lighting, and the other was using a beauty dish pointed at the white background (which you can see off to the left in some of the outtake shots). Normally, I would have used a green screen, but since I wanted to wear a green sweater, I used white. In Photoshop you can easily delete the white background if you mask off the protected area (me, or Christine), then adjust levels or replace color so that the background is more pure white. Then just select with the white background with the magic wand and hit delete. Afterwards, I usually go over the edges with a fine eraser, and then, to make it blend more, I mask our outlines and set a gausian blur to about 1.5 so that we don't look like we were pasted on the picture.

The shots of the kids were merely cloned onto bulbs I shot earlier, which were also cloned in as new layers. And, the opening shot in the video of the splashy bulbs I shot last year in my splash tank, similar to other shots I've done in my Water Wonders Collection (for more on how I do the splash shots, click here).

And here is the final product:

Happy Holidays Everyone!

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