Thursday, February 3, 2011

2011 Topps Reggie Jackson Orioles card - Photoshop Trickery?

In taking a look at the new 2011 Topps cards, I was glad to see that there is a card with Reggie Jackson appearing in an Orioles uniform:


At first, I thought this was a new photo of Reggie as an Oriole as the picture didn't look familiar. However, I went back to the file of Orioles pictures I've been able to track down and found this:


The batting stance is identical, as are the Orioles seen in the dugout. However, for some reason, the crowd in the stands is completely different:


So why in the world did Topps feel that they needed to change the crowd in the stands? In the original, there are some empty seats and a person standing up, but on the Topps card the seats are full and the crowd is completely different.

Its clear that Topps used the image of Reggie from Getty Images (which is where they are getting many of their pictures of retired players), but I can't figure out why they would go to the trouble to replace the background.

4 comments:

Dan said...

Good question. I wonder -- what ballpark did they put Reggie in? Did they put the silo of Reggie in Camden Yards? Maybe that's it.

Matthew Glidden said...

Very interesting. Perhaps they considered the guy standing next to Reggie's head a visual distraction?

twoeightnine said...

Not that shocking assuming that the original photo is b&w and they colorized it for the card. The background in the b&w pic is so blurry and out of focus that coloring it would have a) been tough b)made it even more distracting.

Andy said...

I am glad you asked this question. I have been playing around with photoshop colorizing old images recently, and you helped me solve an issue. Here is the story:

1) the original image was shot in black and white
2) it is quite easy (with the right tools) to colorized the player.
3) it is harder to colorized the out of focus fans in the background. They just replaced them with new fans that were already in color.