Images by Committee

There will be times in the life of any content creator when the desired image doesn’t exist and needs to be created. Those are the times when it’s good to know about objects—photographic images that consist only of a central foreground object, removed entirely from its background.

Our quest is to create an image of a healthy woman working out. As robust as the photos.com library is, we were not able to find the perfect image. But we did find the perfect woman.

She is an object; she has no background. And once we imported her into our image-editing program of choice, with one click of the automatic selection tool, we had her being sent out as a PNG file, the format that supports transparent objects like this one. Then we searched through traditional photographs for a dance studio or a clean, well-lighted gym, and found a great one. And by marrying the two photos, we ended up with this:

We had succeeded...and we had failed. The woman came in transparently atop the studio, all right, but she appears to be floating, as if she doesn’t really belong.

To see how we addressed this problem, visit our editorial archive