Have you ever tried taking photos of a bunch of people? Almost every time, you get a photo where everything is perfect—except for that one guy with his eyes shut. In another shot, that guy is fine, but other people are yawning or looking away from the camera. You probably thought, “Dang, I wish I could move Ed from that photo to this one. Then I’d have a perfect shot.” Adobe heard you, and Group Shot is the result. It’s designed for moving one person in a group from one photo to another, similar photo.
You launch Group Shot by going to File→New→Photomerge Group Shot, or Guided Edit→Photomerge→Group Shot. The steps for using Group Shot are the same as for Faces, except that you don’t normally need to align the photos, since Group Shot is intended for situations where you were saying, “Just one more, everybody!” as opposed to moving people from photos taken at different times with different angles and lighting.
If you do need to align your photos, you can do that with the advanced options (click the flippy triangle next to Advanced Options in the Photomerge Group Shot pane to get to them). Just place the markers the same way you do in Faces (see Figure 11-6). Another advanced option is Pixel Blending, which adjusts the moved material to make it closer in tone to the rest of the Final image.
It would be great if you could use Group Shot for things like creating a photo showing several generations of your family by combining images from photos taken over many years. But Group Shot moves someone from the Source photo and pastes that person into the same spot in the Final photo, and then creates a composite layer in the completed merge. That means the relocated person is merged into the Background image, and isn’t left as an extracted object, so you can’t put that person in a different spot. So you need to tackle your generational-photo project the old-fashioned way: by moving each person onto a separate layer and then repositioning everybody where you want them.