Our Norman Rockwell Christmas Card: Going and Coming

Hopefully everyone has received their Christmas cards from us so now I can share the "magic" behind the image.  And by magic, I mean pure photoshop trickery;)

Here is the image of the original Norman Rockwell painting that we wanted to imitate:

Since our Honda Pilot only has 2 working windows per side (and because of our crazy carseats) we had to create our image from 6 different shots.  As follows:

The "Going" pictures

This image I used the quick selection tool and trimmed it down to fit in that little rear window.

To come out with this: 

( I used some retro photoshop actions to make this look more like the coloring in a Rockwell but toned it down in our final image.)

and the "Coming" :

I forgot to reverse the car before I took this shot and I wasn't going to even attempt putting those two back in the car to shoot again so I just flipped this image and used it as my base for the front and rear window quick selections.

At this point in the shooting I realized I hadn't reversed the car yet so we backed it into Oma's driveway to make it more authentic;)

Same thing as the first set of images, I had to quick select the middle window and trim it down to fit in the rear window of the main car image I had chosen.

At this point I didn't even bother saving the "coming home" image and instead just merged the top and bottom to mimic the Rockwell paining.  Adjusted the brightness on the bottom image to make it look more like it was nightfall and ran some actions to give it a more retro feel.

I added a type layer for all the wording and then I had to add in a digital rosary because we had forgotten to put it back up after out last road trip.  It wouldn't be authentically our family without the rosary on the rearview so it was worth the extra step:)  All in all I am really happy with how it turned out.  We tried to add in some of our own ideas to make the photo a little more "our generation" (coffee instead of cigar) but tried our best to stay true to Mr. Rockwell's original idea.  Here's to the joy of the Great Family Roadtrip!  Merry Christmas from ours to yours:)