I mentioned in my last post about the idea I had for altering some photos to create some unique pictures for my adopted daughter. And I went ahead and tried to do it. I was fairly successful, though the results were less than expected. What I did was cut a baby picture of Jessica from one of her photos, and paste it into a picture of my wife holding our nephew (of course, I cut him out first).
Here are the photos I started with:
I opened the picture of baby Jessica, and used the magnetic lasso tool (second one down, on the left). To use the tool, start anywhere on the outline of the person or object, and while holding the left mouse button down, trace the outline until you get back to where you started. Then let go of the left mouse button, and whatever you traced should be outlined with a flashing dotted line.
I then “lassoed” baby Jessica, and copied her to the clipboard (ctrl-C, or Edit>Copy). Then I opened a new file and pasted the picture of the baby into that. I then opened the picture of my wife and nephew, and did the same thing (lasso tool around the outline of my nephew). Only this time, I don’t need a copy of my nephew, so I lassoed him and cut him out of the picture with ctrl-x (or edit>cut). This left me with a hole in that picture, in the shape of my former nephew. I then opened the file that had just the baby in it. (I left it open while I was working, but you could just save it as whatever, then re-open it).
I then copied the picture of the baby, went back to the picture that used to have my nephew in it, and pasted the baby into that picture. Since the baby was smaller than my nephew, I had to use the clone stamp tool (right above the hand on the tool menu) to clean up around the edges of the baby, and to erase the date on Ronni’s left side. What I ended up with is shown below:
This is just an example of what you can do, and while I am not an expert at this stuff (obviously), there are some pretty cool things that can be done with this technique. One example of using this technique would be if you have a group picture with everyone present except for one person. You could find a picture of that single person and paste them into the group photo. For best results, use the same background for both photos.