One weekend in the Spring of '98, I was listening to copies of The Beatles' Greatest Hits 1962-66, and Greatest Hits 1967-70 that I'd borrowed from one of my college housemates. Those of you familiar with the discs will recognize their distinctive red and blue covers.

Looking at the two covers side by side, I noticed how similar their cover photos are. The Red album's cover was an outtake from the 1962 photo session that produced the cover of their first album, "Please Please Me." When, in 1969, the Beatles were planning what was at that time going to be their final album, they decided to replicate the cover of that first album. They trekked back to the EMI Building, where the 1962 original photo was shot, and posed on the same balcony in the same way. While the photos looked great, the group gave up on the tapes for the album (which were eventually remixed by producer Phil Spector, becoming the album 'Let It Be' in 1970, although with a different cover). In 1973, Capitol Records decided to make a Greatest Hits collection, and used the previously mentioned photos for the covers.

I had so much time on my hands that day that I decided to try to combine the 2 pictures, putting the young Beatles on the balcony above the older Beatles. First, I scanned the two covers on my housemate's scanner and brought them into Photoshop. Deciding to work with the Blue album's cover as my main image, the first thing I realised I had to do was match the colors on both covers - the photo on the Blue cover is balanced more toward more blue than white, and the Red cover's is conversely redder that white. Having done that, I had to correct for angle and scale on the Red cover, rotating it slightly and shrinking the young Beatles down to fit on that upper balcony. Then came the key: rather than simply joining the two pictures along a cut line, the image you see is 90% the Blue album's photo. After sizing the 1962 Beatles down and positioning them properly, I removed every part of that picture EXCEPT the Beatles themselves, leaving them floating in place. A large part of the remaining work lay in placing them believably into the shot, adding shadow and reflections where they would naturally go. After that, I took pieces of the Red album's photo (the ceiling and a few actual balconies) and merged them into the shot, correcting for perspecive changes (the depth of field on the 2 photos are very different). To finish it off and enhance the blending, I added a slight, fading red tint to the upper half of the photo so that toward the top of the image it would more closely match the pallette of the Red album. That was pretty much it.

Later on, I found out that Capitol Records had at one point created almost the exact same picture for some promotional artwork for the Greatest Hits albums. When they did it, though, they were using simple photographic processes, and you can plainly see cut lines and color inconsistencies on theirs where the two images are pieced together.