Add Person to Photo

WHICH PICTURE YOU ARE MAKING. You return Image 1. The finished picture is Image 1's place, Image 1's light, Image 1's weather, Image 1's frame - the same photograph it always was, with somebody new standing in it. Image 2 is not a scene and never becomes the answer; it is a source you reach into and lift a person out of, and everything else about it is discarded the moment you have them. So: put the person from Image 2 into the photograph in Image 1, so the result looks like one photograph in which they were standing there when the shutter fired. BRING EVERYONE. If Image 2 shows more than one person as its subject, every one of them comes across into Image 1 - all of them, not the largest or the most central. Two subjects means two people arrive; three means three. Nobody is left behind. ONLY THE PEOPLE TRAVEL. They arrive carrying nothing but themselves, their clothing and whatever is in their hands. Everything else that shares the frame with them in Image 2 stays behind: the surface they were standing on, the wall or backdrop behind them, the sky above them, the furniture beside them, the markings across the picture, and any distant figure who merely happened to be passing in the background of their photograph. Those distant passers-by are not subjects and do not come. IMAGE 1 IS UNCHANGED. Everything already in the destination photograph stays exactly as it is - the same ground, buildings, water, sky, objects and people, in the same places, at the same size. You are adding to it and nothing else. The camera does not move and the frame is not recropped. STAND THEM ON THE REAL GROUND. Put their feet on the surface that people actually walk on in Image 1 - the same surface the people already in the picture are standing on, at the height they are standing at. Pick a spot on it that is open, where somebody standing would be unremarkable. Their feet meet that surface: not floating above it, not sunk into it, and not perched up on something narrow at the edge of it. GET THE SIZE RIGHT, BY MEASURING IT. This is the thing most likely to go wrong, so do it deliberately. Before placing them, find something in Image 1 whose real height you already know: another person, a doorway, a car, a railing, a balcony, a parked bicycle. Then size your figure against it at the depth you are putting them. - Anyone standing at the same distance as an existing person is the same height as that person. Not larger. - A standing adult reaches roughly the top of a ground-floor doorway, roughly the underside of a first-floor balcony, roughly the roof of a car. - The further back you place them, the smaller they are, and the higher up the frame their feet sit. Then look at what you have made and check it: if their head is level with an upstairs window, or they tower over people standing beside them, they are far too big and must be made smaller. An oversized figure is the single most common way this fails and it ruins the picture on sight. RELIGHT THEM FROM SCRATCH. The light they were photographed under is gone. Look at how Image 1 is lit: which direction the light comes from, whether it is hard sunlight or soft cloud, how warm or cool it is, how bright the shadows are. Rebuild the person under that light. Their lit side faces the same way as every other lit side in the scene, and their shadow side sits at the same depth as every other shadow. TAKE THEIR REAL COLOURS, NOT THE ONES THE OLD LIGHT GAVE THEM. Work out what this person actually looks like in plain daylight - the true colour of their skin, their hair, their clothing - underneath whatever the lamps and film in Image 2 did to them. That true colouring is what you carry across, and then Image 1's own light is what colours it. So: their skin comes out as natural, healthy skin with blood under it, warm and varied the way skin is. Their hair comes out its own colour. Their clothes come out the colour they were dyed, at ordinary saturation. Where their own photograph does not tell you a colour, decide what it must have been and paint it in - a person standing in a colour photograph is fully coloured, in exactly the way everybody else in that photograph is coloured, with no part of them left grey or drained. Nothing about their colouring should be traceable to the photograph they came from; if it is, they will read as a sticker on the picture rather than a person in it. GIVE THEM A SHADOW. They cast one onto the ground of Image 1, falling in the same direction and with the same softness as the shadows already in the scene, and touching them where their feet meet the ground. If the surface is wet, glossy or water, they reflect in it too. KEEP THEM THEMSELVES. Same face, same build, same hair, same clothing and colours, same pose and stance as in Image 2. Do not restyle, redress, or change their expression. CHECK BEFORE YOU FINISH. Two things, in this order. Put your figure beside the nearest person, doorway or vehicle in Image 1 and confirm the heights make sense. Then look at their skin and clothing beside everyone else's in the scene and confirm they are lit and coloured by the same light. FINISH IT SO IT DOES NOT SHOW. They sit at the same sharpness as things at their distance in Image 1, carry the same grain and the same slight haze, and their edges are as soft as every other edge in the picture.