Cut-outs and composite heroes

The Today's bread page needs a first picture, and the owner has a phone photo of the Country loaf on a sheet of baking paper. Cut out, the loaf can sit right on the page's own background. Done well, nobody notices. Done badly, it looks like a sticker.

Before you cut anything, check you're allowed to change it, because a cut-out is an altered photo. The owner took this one herself, and nobody's in it. Until she says yes to the change in writing, the manifest marks it unconfirmed, and it doesn't ship. A photo whose license says no derivatives can't be cut out and published at all. A supplier's product shot or a customer's photo needs their yes first.

The plain paper makes this easy. The script takes the paper's color from the border and removes everything that matches it, including the paper's own shadow. It keeps one piece: fifteen percent of the photo. Then look at the mask, not the result on the page. White is kept, black is gone. Along the top, specks of flour have been cut out as holes, a hundred and seventeen pixels of them, because flour is the color of the paper. Fill the holes, then pull the edge in one pixel and soften it over one, so no paper is left along it. At full size, the stepped edge is now smooth. Flour right on the edge, you fix by hand, or shoot again on darker paper.

The second photo, the loaf in its basket, fails outright. The script keeps thirty-four percent of the photo, more than twice the loaf alone: the basket is as brown as the crust, so it comes too. Use that photo whole, or not at all. Anything the color of its backdrop fails the same way: flour, steam, glass and shine.

Now place it. A big, soft drop shadow, the default in many tools, makes the loaf float above the page like a sticker. Give it a contact shadow instead: dark and tight where the loaf touches, gone a little way out. The photo's light came from the left, so the shadow leans right. And don't add light, steam or a glow the photo never had. That's a claim about the loaf, made with pixels.

Last, the manifest. The cut-out gets its own entry: which photo it came from, what was changed, and who allowed it. Months from now, that entry is how anyone knows whose loaf this is, and that moving it was allowed.

Cut out only what you're allowed to change. Check the mask, not the page. And give it a shadow only where it touches.