Fun with Photoshop - Molly Magic!

Okay, so I had a little bit of fun with this one... When we took the big group shot of the family Molly did not want to participate. I am sure that she sensed that the special event of the day centered on Will. So we all took the picture without her (she was there in spirit). Afterward we got her to participate in a few other photos so we joked that we could edit her in. And I had a great time doing just that! I will show you what I did below:

After Photoshop:

As you can see Molly is in the picture... but was she really there?

Original #1 (no photoshop):

Not so, this was the base picture that I worked with. I will show you the picture that I pulled her from in a moment. Now if you study this picture and the one above closely you will notice that I make a couple more changes too. In this one, Will is in the middle of a yawn, and I didn't want the star of the day to have his mouth wide open for this important picture, so I edited him, too, using the picture below. The other edit I made was that I wanted Eli to be looking more towards the camera, so...

Original #2 (no photoshop): I took baby Will's head from this picture to use in the finished product because in this one he was looking more in the direction of the camera.

Original #3 (no photoshop): And finally I took Eli's head from this one and pasted it into the finished product as well. I did have one challenge in doing this though because I had to reconstruct some of Forrest's neck and shirt collar to have Eli's head facing this direction. And now for Molly...

Original #4 (no photoshop):

Pasting in Molly was the biggest challenge, because the best picture I had of her from that day was from this picture above. There were a couple problems though, first in this picture the camera was zoomed in closer which made Molly to big for simply pasting into the other image, and second, her right arm was hidden by me in this picture. So in the end I had to cut her out, resize her, reconstruct her right arm, and place her appropriately in the picture above. Sounds fun doesn't it?! I am pretty satisfied with the final product. I realize that now that you know my secret you will probably always look at this picture and see the slightly pasted in appearance she has, but I think that if you don't tell people they probably wouldn't notice.

Now I'm not done with my editing fun... Take a look at the picture above. We took about three shots of the cousins together, and of all the ones on my camera there were closed eyes or children looking away, so I had to do some more photoshop magic. In the image above, Robby's eyes are closed, and Jenna and Eli are looking away.

Original #5 (no photoshop):

In the one above I have Molly with her hand near her mouth and looking away and Will looking away, but Robby and Jenna are looking at the camera and Eli is turned a little more to the camera.

After Photoshop:And Voila! Here we have all of the children looking generally in the direction of the camera! All I did was take Robby's and Jenna's eyes and Eli's head from "Original #5" and paste them appropriately in "Original #4" to create the finished product above.

Robby was telling me I shouldn't photoshop too many pictures or else people will start thinking we were never actually there, and that I just photoshopped us in.

You wouldn't think that would you?!