Unless you're a scrooge, you have to admit that babies make cute subjects for Christmas cards. One of this year's cuties was Kinsley. At less than 4 months old, we wanted to do something that involved more than just a baby laying down a floor rug or being propped up. We set up a few basic Christmas items without being too distracting. We then decided to bring in a rocking horse and make this the centerpiece for where Kinsley would be seated. Unfortunately, at this age, there was no way she could hold herself up, so we had to cheat a bit and use some digital editing.

This is what our plate looked like. The plate is the image without people and is used as a base layer so that as we mask out unwanted elements of Kinsley’s image, the base layer (the plate) shows through.

Plate

With the plate image done, we moved Kinsley into position and sat her on the rocking horse. Because she wasn’t old enough to hold herself up, she had to be held up. This is what the original image looked like.

SOOC

Next the 2 separate images were combined. In this instance we knew mama had to go, so we had to mask her out to make it look like only Kinsley was in the image. During this process, I also realized that the rocking horse had moved a bit between images and it took a bit of additional editing to match the placement of the horse up, but the overall result is to make it look like Kinsley was sitting up al on her own.

Final

Overall, this wasn’t a complicated composite but compositing was necessary to get Kinsley to sit up on her own. It was a fun experience  and makes for a memorable first Christmas portrait.