Six staff, three shoot days, one group banner
A firm wants a single group image of six staff for a website banner and for a 3 m wide exhibition panel. The staff could never be in the office together, so they were photographed in pairs on three different days. One pair was shot against a slightly cooler, blue-grey wall under fluorescent light; the others were shot against warm neutral walls in daylight. The pairs are also at slightly different scales and camera heights. You have all six source files as camera JPEGs and one afternoon to build the composite.
1. In what order should you do the work, and why does colour matching come before masking and positioning?
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Suggested order:
- Set up a master document at the final aspect ratio with a transparent or chosen background, at a resolution that satisfies the largest output.
- Normalise colour and tone first, layer by layer. If you cut people out and position them before matching, you will have to redo the masks or re-check every seam once the tones shift. Matching first also reveals which sources are simply unusable.
- Cut out and mask each person/pair onto its own layer with a soft-edged mask.
- Scale and position using a common reference (eye height and horizon line) so nobody floats or looks giant.
- Blend: feathered mask edges, matched shadow under each figure, and a shared background/floor gradient.
- Final grade globally over the whole composite so all six sit in one light.
The cool pair needs a warm-up adjustment (Curves/Colour Balance) clipped to that layer, sampled from skin tone or a known neutral, so they match the daylight pairs before anything is assembled.
2. What specific techniques keep this non-destructive and re-editable, given the panel may be re-cut later?
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- Convert each source to a Smart Object before scaling. Repeated free-transform on a raster layer resamples the pixels each time and softens faces; a Smart Object keeps the original and re-renders on each scale change.
- Layer masks, not erasers. Every cut-out is a mask, so edges can be feathered, tightened or extended after review.
- Clipped adjustment layers per person, so the colour match belongs to that layer and does not affect neighbours.
- Named layers and groups (e.g. Person_01, ColourMatch, Cutout, Shadow) so a returning editor can find things without guessing.
- Keep the layered master as PSD/TIFF and export flats for each output. Never deliver only the flattened JPEG, or the next edit starts from scratch.
- A layer comp or saved duplicate for each output size avoids re-doing the crop for banner vs panel.
3. The same master must serve a 1600 px website banner and a 3 m wide exhibition panel. What do you need to check before committing, and how do you judge whether the source files are good enough?
Read the worked answer
Do the pixel arithmetic first. A 3 m panel viewed from around 2-3 m can print acceptably at roughly 30-50 ppi. At 40 ppi, 3 m (118 in) needs about 118 x 40 = ~4700 px wide. If each person occupies roughly one-sixth of the width, each source must supply around 800 px of body height at final scale - check the camera JPEGs before promising anything.
If the sources fall short:
- Reduce the planned panel size, or use fewer, larger figures.
- Place the group against a generated or photographic background so only the people are upsampled, not the whole frame.
- Keep type and logos as vector in the panel layout so the only raster element is the people.
For the web banner, build a separate 1600 px version from the master, convert to sRGB, sharpen lightly after downsampling. Two exports from one master, never a single file stretched both ways.