Comparison of the morphology of the final remnant of model gSbgSdo71 (E/S0) in its V-band mock images (top) and its maps of projected particle positions (bottom), for the face-on and edge-on views. We have assumed a distance of D = 30 Mpc, μ_lim(V) = 26 mag arcsec⁻² (Vega) for S/N = 5, and a FWHM = 0.5″ for the photometric images (Table 4). The selected grayscale emphasises the sky noise of the images. In the maps, different types of stellar particles in the remnant are plotted using different colours (dark green: hybrid particles, progenitor 1; blue: old stars, progenitor 1; light green: hybrid particles, progenitor 2; purple: old stars, progenitor 2). The field of view (FoV) is 100 × 100 kpc² in all frames. The horizontal line at the top left corner of the top panels represents 10 kpc. Notice how faint tidal structures at the outskirts of the maps are strongly diluted in the photometric images when observational effects are realistically accounted for.