Forum:SH:Imagine compositing and canon

Hey, folks. I have a simple question for you, one I've wondered about for a while now. Say you have this image of C-3PO and this image of Luke Skywalker, both taken from the Encyclopedia at StarWars.com. Say you want to include both images in an article, but there's not enough room. Both are promotional images, and both are of characters with only white backgrounds. Is it acceptable to composite them into one image, side-by-side, with no line between them, using photo manipulation software, to create a single image? I can see two sides to this question:
 * 1) On the one hand, this might constitute a violation of canon, since such an image now might suggest that C-3PO and Luke Skywalker stood next to one another at one specific moment and adopted those exact poses. In other words, compositing the two images together may imply that they represent the same scene, and that the two characters are occupying the same space and time. This isn't a question of whether Luke and C-3PO ever stood next to each other or whether they ever knew each other (we know they did), but rather a question of whether C-3PO stood just like that at the same time that Luke Skywalker stood and grinned just like that.
 * 2) On the other hand, these are both promotional images, with white backgrounds, so they already occupy a sort of limbo land that indicates they aren't meant to represent a specific instance or moment. Therefore, putting them together might be taken as nothing more than an illustration technique, with no temporal or spatial relationship implied. In other words, as promo images, we don't necessarily have to assume that the two elements in the image (the droid and the Human) necessarily made those exact poses at those exact times; the assumption is not that this is a "scene" per se.

Note that the canonical status of the Luke and 3PO promo images is not in question; they are used as images in a canonical source, the Encyclopedia, so this is more a question about whether putting them together somehow violates canon, or if it does not. I honestly don't know the answer to this, although I lean toward option 1. Any thoughts? ~ Savage  16:04, January 22, 2012 (UTC)