A Photoshop Project

I've spent the evening doing a favor for my friend Bonnie. That's what friends do...jump in and help when they can. Bonnie's daughter's mother-in-law lost her battle against a rare neurodegenerative disease and the memorial service is scheduled for Saturday. The family wants to display a photo of their beloved wife and mother in part to personalize the service but also to help them remember this beautiful woman before a cruel disease affected her looks and her personality. They had a picture of her and her husband...could I work a little Photoshop magic and make one of her alone? While I'm hardly an expert, this looked like a doable task and I was glad to do my part to make this difficult time as little easier.

Here was my process:

The original photo was 8x10 but two people; the finished product was to be at least 8x10 and maybe 11x14 and only one person so I scanned the original photo in at 600 dpi. This would keep the image quality at a high level when the edited photo was cropped down to 300 dpi. I didn't include all of the man in the photo when I scanned but did allow some extra space on the right. You can see there's some damage to the photo on the left where it was creased in the frame and there's also white border on the left that was never cut off the original.

I used the marquee tool to copy sections of the backdrop taken from the upper left corner and paste them over the man. You can see the series of rectangles along the right where the colors and patterns don't quite match. It probably would have been more meaningful if I had saved a version before I used the eraser tool to eliminate the sections that covered the woman but I didn't. I erased until I could see a small black outline around the woman, turning the layers created by each pasted backdrop section off and on to see where the edges of her hair and clothing were.

After flattening all those layers, I used the rubber stamp tool to blend away the lines between the sections. It really helped that the backdrop was made up of irregular shapes and several shades of the same color as that made blending easier. I also stamped to fill in the backdrop right up to the edge of her clothing and hair. To me it's easier to erase extra and fill back in because you can see the edges where you're sort of guessing where they are when you're erasing. And that same rubber stamp tool worked to add more hair so the edges there weren't such a severe line. That's one of the hardest parts of deleting an object/person from a photo...getting the hair to look natural as there's always fly-aways that are hard to duplicate. 

Then I cropped the photo. There's a bit more space on the right than I'd really like but it needed to be a standard size for a frame and I'd already maximized the space on the left by fixing the crease mark and extending the photo into that small white strip. I did both of those repairs with the rubber stamp tool as well.

Finally, I toned down the blue and added a warm filter to make the colors more like the original. The scanner brightened up the photo quite a bit, and while I personally liked the look, I felt my task was to produce a photo that looked as much like the original as I could make it. I think it took me as long to get the color right as it did to isolate the woman.

The end result looks pretty good...a little softer maybe but still a nice image. Best of all, it's difficult to tell that it was once part of another photo. I hope seeing it will make the family remember happy times.

Comments

[Pat]

Great job, Brenda. I'm sure the family will be pleased with this special gift.

[Judy H.]

You did a wonderful job with this, Brenda! The family should be very pleased!

[Donna]

So sweet of you to do this for them. My mechanic & dear friend lost his 18 year old daughter today. She was in a very bad car crash 2 days ago & there is no brain activity so they stopped life support today. So very very sad for him.

[robin d]

I finally got to look at the blog. I wanted to thank you for helping me with this picture. The picture looked amazing and the family was amazed. Thank you for all your support! Love ya!