We Spent Hours Photoshopping Our Christmas Card This Year… Can You Tell?

'Tis the season to spend hours photoshopping your pets into holiday greeting cards!

With us, it's sort of a tradition. My girlfriend Erica has been sending Christmas cards for years (I was never a big card guy), but I AM into meticulously photoshopping everything for no really good reason. So this year, we combined our talents to create the most epic card we could think of.

You might remember back in March, I recreated my ridiculous baby photo. Hilariously, that didn't really require much photoshopping at all. (I still have the cheeks!) But for our Christmas card this year... we wanted everyone in the whole family to look as dapper as possible.

Erica and I went with the matching holiday sweaters and jackets, and the cats dressed up in their bow-ties. (That's actually the same bow tie in the photo twice.)

With one crazy cat who won't hold still, a gigantic 30-pound monster cat that you can't really hold for more than a few seconds, and a guinea pig that's camera shy... this was a bit of a chore.

Can you tell that this photo is actually four different pictures stitched together? Here's how we did it:

The first photo I took was a base photo of the tree without anyone in the shot. Then, Erica and I took turns taking each other's picture, each of us holding a cat on either side of the tree. I had Marshmallow (her cat) and she had Percy (my cat.) That's how we used the same bow tie twice! Then, we put Neville the piggy in a basket and picked the best photo of him to overlay the others.

Then, we picked the best shots of each of us, and spliced them together! The hardest part about that is making sure the angle and position of the camera are exactly the same each time, and that the lighting is pretty similar. We even changed Erica's pants to be a darker color! Did you notice?

Here's the final photo!