Mom of two Abby Ordenana wanted the picture perfect shot for her family Christmas card this year.
But she didn’t want to shuffle off to the mall to have a halfway decent frame snapped by a seasonal department store shutterbug, nor did she feel like setting the timer on her camera phone, sprinting into place and hoping not to look a disheveled, sweaty fright after the flash.
So, Ordenana, 32, Photoshopped herself, her 11-year-old daughter and their dog Zeus into a holiday snap set against a $2,000 all-fabric backdrop, which she purchased earlier in the year for work, alongside her husband Elias and son Ezra, 8, in their living room.
“Photoshopping my Christmas picture was great because [the software] literally allows you to create anything. Sky’s the limit,” Ordenana, a newborn and maternity photographer from Orlando, Fla., explained to The Post.
To stitch together the yuletide visual, she first set each member of her family into position and took their photo on her Canon EOS 6D camera, leaving a space between her kids empty. Then, she had Aria step out of the shot to take a photo of her seated in the vacant spot she created in the initial shot.
And after 30 minutes of picture taking, Ordenana spent another 45 minutes meticulously merging the two shots together, and adding in a previously snapped picture of Zeus, to actualize “the perfect image.” And her nearly seamless edit scored over 227,000 likes on TikTok.
“It’s a complicated process,” she admitted with a laugh. “But I want my kids to one day look back at the photo and say, ‘Wow, mom really outdid herself when it came to getting those Christmas pictures — so much so that she photoshopped herself in there.’”
And Ordenana isn’t the only one to use the image-editing software to create holiday magic this season. In fact, the hashtag #ChristmasPhotoshop has earned over 10,000 TikTok views. However, not everyone is getting a cheery thumbs up for their retouching efforts.
Social media scrooges recently gave “American Idol” veteran judge Paula Abdul, 60, a virtual lump of coal after she shared a series of presumed photoshopped images of herself at Kathy Hilton’s Christmas party online.
Billionaire trendsetter Kim Kardashian, 42, too, caught jingle bell hell for allegedly photoshopping in her sisters and mother Kris Jenner into a festive family image that she shared on Instagram.
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Digital whistleblowers called out the reality stars for their awkward body positioning, strange facials expressions and uneven lighting in the shot. And for posting the peculiar picture, photoshop accusers called the Skims mogul “shallow” and “garbage.”
But Kardashian, who’s previously fallen victim to a number of viral photoshop fails, set the record straight about her controversial Christmas snap Wednesday. On her Instagram Story, the A-lister shared behind-the-scenes footage of her clan posing together for the group shot.
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And while Kardashian successfully dodged her most recent string of photoshop charges, professional photographer Caitie Corkal tells The Post that piecing together separate photos to create one cohesive portrait can add a dash of whimsy to an otherwise humdrum holiday novelty.
“Photoshopping our annual Christmas photo allows me to make something fun and lighthearted that makes people laugh,” said Corkal, 31, from Toronto. Each year she transforms individual pictures of herself, her husband Liam and their two dogs and two cats into a wacky season’s greeting card.
A December 2021 edit of her hubby and fur babies dressed in ugly sweaters and Santa hats while riding on her German shepherd’s back fetched over 4.3 million eyes on TikTok. This year’s photoshop of the family decorating a life-sized gingerbread house raked in 789,500 views.
“It hard to get us all in one room and posed for a family picture,” Corkal confessed. “So, photoshopping us together gives us something that everyone loves rather than a boring, cookie-cutter shot.”