how to composite a corporate group head shot

A Dallas based client hired me to photograph head shots for a company and they also requested a group shot of 7 people. Unfortunately the space they gave was too small to shoot a group shot with all those people. So the solution was to shoot each person individually and composite them together to make one awesome group shot.

Lighting Technique

Below I used a 48" Softbox as key, slightly to camera right and slightly above the subjects jaw line. This adds light direction from right to left, leaving the left side of their faces slightly darker than the right. Keeping the key light above the jaw line creates a chin shadow that is necessary for sepration from the neck.

On the opposite side of the key like and behind the subject is a diffused hair light. This hair light is used to create dimension and separation from the background. It's also necessary when I plan to change the background to a bright window type setting.

As you can see I took individual shots due to the space constraints. But by doing this I'm able to do much more dynamic lighting on each person vs. a group shot. Corporate group shots when done as a group don't allow the photographer to wrap lighting around each subject. So what you end up with is really flat lighting because you have to light the entire group as one.

Corporate group photography Tips

Before taking each persons photo, we established which side of the frame the employees were going to be on and then positioned their bodies at an angle to minimize image width. Angling the shoulders adds depth and opens up better posing options. I also made sure to not adjust the zoom or the height at which I captured the subject.

How to composite and change the background

Photography compositing is the act of combining multiple photos into one finished photo. This skill when executed with post production in mind, can be a useful and convenient way to execute photo shoots. In this shoot the end goal is to create one group shot image with the 7 employee individual shots on a modern bright background.

In the past I would use Adobe Photoshop to remove the background and this process was very teadious. The image above usually would take about 3 minutes to remove the subject from the background. Now I use Evoto, a powerful AI image editing software that has saved me hours of work. I highly recommend using their software for your workflow. The above image background was removed with one click and it even works with darker images. But for best results use good lighting and have your subject well defined from the background. Export as .png and you're done with this step.

combining our images

-Now that we have all of our subjects cut out from their original backgrounds, we can hop over to Adobe Photoshop

and import our .pngs.

• Open up the first image and the first thing we need to do is create room for the other subjects. Open up your crop by hitting "c" on your keyboard, then drag out the box to create space like you see below.

• Now begin importing each person into the empty space. Make sure to keep their sizing proportionate with how they are relative to each other in real life. You can even add a guide at their feet to mark where the ground will be.

• Now that we have everyone placed together we can add in our stock background. I use Envato for all of my stock needs. They have everything from graphics, stock photos, videos, music and AI generating tools all unlimited for around $35 a month.

• When chosing the right background you want to find something that matches your lighting and perspective from your original photos.

• As you can see this background matches the perspective and the bright windows match well with our hair light. But somethings not quite right...

• Next we need to land down our subjects with some shadowing and a slight reflection. This part is pretty advanced and may take some trial and error to get a natural look.

• Start by creating an empty layer above the background but below the images of the people. This allows us to paint in the shadow without effecting the background or the people. Doing it this way will save us from a headache if we mess up and have to go back.

Here is what my layer order looks like. The people at the top(front) and the shadows below and then the background under everything (behind).

• Now let's begin layering in the shadows. First let's decide on where the light is coming from. Because we have windows behind us it makes sense to add the shadows coming towards the camera at a slight angle towards the center. But first lets begin with the first shadow layer.

  
  

The first shadow layer is a darker black, painted in right underneath the shoes with a soft edge and doesn't extend

out much at all. This shadow represents the area where just about no light gets to because the shoes are touching the ground. This layer is important to do seperate from the next shadow layer so we can adjust them individually later.

Next shadow represents the legs blocking light and the tops of the feet blocking light. We want to carefully paint in black with the brush tool at 100% and a soft edge around the areas of the ground where we think would be shaded. At first it will look weird but then we will adjust the new layers opacity down to make it natural.

Next we will add a reflection of the people standing by duplicating the layer of people (command+J) then flipping that layer vertically. Then you align the layers manually and the layer mask out the parts that don't work. Typically the shoes don't work and I just keep the reflection of the legs. Drop the opacity of the reflection layer down to what looks real and then maybe add a surface blur filter.

Now that we have everyone in place, landed down and the background looking good, there's one last step and that's to add a lens blur filter to the back of the background. This will really sell the effect that the background is real and a part of the photo.

The final Results!

I left some excess headroom just incase the client wanted to add their logo or any text. Hope you guys enjoyed this photography and editing tutorial. Be sure to subscribe to the blog for more updates!