Combining New and Old Photos: Putting Two Generations in One Frame

Combining new and old photos lets you seat a great-granddaughter next to the great-grandmother she never met. Creative Team Member Joan shares the technique — and the reason it is worth doing.

Joan shares her process for combining new and old photos in Photoshop.

My grandniece Nina has become the family historian. Her interest sharpened considerably after she moved into the same town her great-grandmother — my mother — grew up in. She walks past the school. She shops on the same main street. And not long ago she found an old photograph with her great-grandmother in it, taken when my mother was about the same age Nina is now.

I told her I had that picture. In fact, I had just scanned it into my heritage catalog, so I handed her the original. Then it kept nagging at me. These two women are separated by four generations and one small town, and they have never been in a room together. But they could be in a photograph together. So I found a picture of Nina from her high school years and placed her into my mother’s team photo, in the gap between two girls sitting on the grass.

Quick Jump — Table of Contents

• → Why Combining New and Old Photos Belongs in Your Album
• → What You’ll Need Before You Start
• → Select Your New and Old Photos
• → Adjust the New Photo Before Combining
• → Line the New and Old Photos Up
• → Mask the Old Photo
• → Merge and Save Your Work
• → Turn It Into a Page That Tells a Story

Why Combining New and Old Photos Belongs in Your Album

Most heritage pages we make are one-directional. The old photograph sits on the page, we add a date, a name if we know it, maybe a line about where it was taken. The ancestor stays firmly in the past, and the person turning the album pages stays firmly in the present. Nothing wrong with that — it is how albums have worked for a hundred years.

This technique does something different. It collapses the distance. When your granddaughter sees herself sitting on the grass with her great-grandmother’s hockey team, the photograph stops being a historical document and becomes something she has a place in. She is not looking at strangers in old clothes. She is looking at family, and she is in the picture.

That matters practically, too. Family history gets passed down by whoever finds it interesting, and interest usually starts young. A composite like this one is the sort of thing a teenager screenshots and sends to her friends. Furthermore, it opens the conversation — who is that? What year was this? Did she play hockey her whole life? — which is exactly the conversation you want to be having while the people who remember the answers are still here to give them.

One honest caveat before we start. Label it. On the page, in the journaling, or in the file name — make it clear the image is a composite. Heritage catalogs get handed down, and you do not want a great-great-grandchild fifty years from now trying to work out how Nina ended up on a 1940s hockey team. The meaning survives the disclosure perfectly well.

What You’ll Need Before You Start Combining New and Old Photos

• → Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements — see the software comparison if you are deciding between them.
• → One scanned heritage photo, at the highest resolution you have. Scan at 600 dpi if you can — you will be enlarging parts of it.
• → One modern photo of the family member you want to add.
• → Whatever you know about the original photo — the year, the place, the names. That is what turns the finished image into a story rather than a trick.

Step 01

Select Your New and Old Photos

Choose carefully, because this is the step that decides everything else. You are looking for two things at once: a gap in the heritage photo where a person could plausibly sit or stand, and a pose in the modern photo that fits that gap.

Think about the pairing as well as the geometry. The strongest composites put two people together who share something — an age, an activity, a place, a family resemblance. Nina and my mother were roughly the same age in these two photographs, which is a large part of why the finished image lands the way it does.

For my heritage photo I chose a girls’ hockey team, with my mother in the back row on the far right. What sold me on it was the space between two of the players sitting on the ground. That gap is exactly the right shape for another seated figure.

For the new picture I picked a shot of Nina sitting on a boat. Her legs are not visible in the frame, and that turns out to be an advantage rather than a problem — in the finished composite the girls sitting in front of her hide her legs anyway.

Step 02

Adjust the New Photo Before Combining New and Old Photos

Two adjustments do the heavy lifting here. First the colour goes, then the grain comes back.

That noise setting is worth fussing over. Zoom to 100% on both images and compare. Grain is the fingerprint of the era — film stock, developing, seventy years in a shoebox — and if the new face is cleaner than everything around it, the eye catches it immediately. Therefore, err on the side of slightly too much rather than slightly too little.

Step 03

Line the New and Old Photos Up

Now both photos go onto one document, with the old one sitting on top.

Step 04

Mask the Old Photo — Where Combining New and Old Photos Happens

This is where the new face actually appears inside the old scene. You are not erasing anything — you are hiding parts of the old photo so the layer below shows through. The original scan stays untouched, which matters when you are working with the only copy of something.

Keep going back and forth between black and white until only the part you want is visible. Of course, a mask is endlessly editable, so there is no cost to experimenting. Soften the brush edge slightly where the new figure meets shoulders or clothing in the old photo — a hard edge there is the giveaway.

Step 05

Merge and Save Your Work

You need a flat version to drop onto a scrapbook page, but you also want the layered file — heritage projects have a way of coming back around when a cousin turns up a better scan. So make both.

Before you call it done, zoom in and check two things. First, that no stray corner of the new photo is showing where it should not be. Second, that both halves of the image carry the same grain — that shared texture is what stops the new face from announcing itself.

Combining New and Old Photos into a Page That Tells a Story

The composite is the hook. The journaling is what makes it worth keeping. A layered page gives you room for both — the image in the centre, and around it the names, the dates, and the small facts that will otherwise leave with the last person who remembers them.

If you are not sure what to write, these prompts get most people started.

• → Who is in the original photograph, and how old were they?
• → Who did you add, and how are the two of them related?
• → What do they have in common — the town, the sport, the stubborn chin?
• → One line noting that the image is a composite, and the year you made it.

Then build the page around it the way you would any other. Blend the edges into a paper background, add texture behind the photograph so it sits in the layout rather than on top of it, and use realistic drop shadows to give the whole thing weight. If you are new to layered pages, start with the basics of building a digital scrapbook page and come back to this.

Nina has the original photograph now, in a frame. She also has this one, which is the version she shows people. Finally, both of them live in the family catalog, side by side — the record and the reunion.

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