Project2.Fun Family Photo Christmas Cards

Project 2. Fun Family Photo Christmas Cards

Christmas and other holidays can be fairly stressful as we all rush to meet obligations, family and otherwise. One of the things that might get pushed aside as time gets tighter is the obligatory holiday family photo.

If you find you've run out of time, gather a few snapshots of the family, hunt for an old holiday photo (you likely have tons of them in slide form, negatives, and 4"x6" printsthey're up in the bedroom closet behind the baseball gear, next to your cycling helmet...) and get them together. The photos that is, who knows where your family is at this time of the year.

To get started with this project, you'll need two photos. I'll be using a scan of a very old slide of a Christmas tree and a digital camera photo of one of the boys who live next door to me. If you don't have any photos of this nature, you can download the ones I'm using (Xmas Tree.tif and Older Brother.tif) from the book's companion website.

The colors in these two images differ widely. The slide is of a bit faded, is poorly lit, and is an indoor photo, so it's very warm in color, tending toward the reddish-orange. The other is a recent shot from a fairly new-tech digital camera taken outside in diffused shade, so it's fairly cool tending toward a blue-ish tint. Therefore, some color correction will be needed. But first, let's start with creating a Christmas shot from two completely different photos.

1.

Open two photos as outlined previously. You can see the two I'm using in Figure 10.15.

Figure 10.15. A holiday portrait (in the making).

Removing the Background

You'll need to remove the background material behind the portrait so the Christmas tree shows through behind the young man.

Here's a shooting tip. If you want to be able to do this type of project, and ones like the Halloween project, you should try shooting some of your portraits using a plain background. I often use 4-feet squares of black foam core, available at your local art supply store. Your local photo supply store should also have stands you can use to hold the foam core in place. I often simply stand them against furniture or use a chair to prop them up.

For bigger shots, you can get some black fabric from your local fabric store and hang it using thumbtacks.

At the same time, you can also get some white foam core or fabric and experiment with using it to help reflect light back onto your portrait subjects. You will be amazed at the difference it can make in your photography.

With a solid background behind your portraits, you'll be able to remove the backgrounds more easily.

2.

Use your favorite method to remove the background behind the portrait. If you need a little help with how that's done, see Appendix B. There's a lot of helpful stuff there, all related to this type of technique.

Adding a Little Holiday Cheer

Now that the background has been successfully removed, it's time to add the holiday image.

3.	Activate the Christmas photo and select an area you'd like to copy into the background behind the portrait. I selected all of the Christmas tree, for example, using the Selection tool with the type set to Rectangle.
4.	With the area selected, choose Edit, Copy. Then activate the portrait image. If you're like me, you have the original Background layer intact with the portrait in a new layer above it; if so, activate the Background layer and select Edit, Paste As New Layer. This pastes the selected area between the Background layer and the portrait layer. If the only layer you have is the portrait, paste in the new layer and then drag its entry down in the Layers palette so that it's below the portrait layer. Turn off the visibility of the Background layer. You should now have the tree pasted in behind the portrait, as in Figure 10.16. Figure 10.16. Pasting the holiday image behind the portrait.
5.	Use the Pick tool to move the tree into place, and resize it as necessary.
6.	To add to the illusion of this being one image, the background (the tree and other decorations) should be slightly blurred as if out of focus. To create this effect, select Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur and set the Radius to 23.00. A high value like this on a high-resolution image gives the illusion of a portrait lens. Figure 10.17. Blurring the background to give the effect of a portrait lens.

Doing a Little Color Correction

To help the two images match up, the portrait needs to have some color correction applied. We could, of course, apply the correction to the background, but portraits look better warmer than they do cooler.

Color correction can be a difficult chore. Luckily, Paint Shop Pro 10 has some awesome tools that can make the process painless. I'll show you how to match up the two images in this project with a couple of mouse clicks and a click and drag or two.

7.

Activate the layer with the portrait by clicking its entry in the Layers palette.

8.

Select Adjust, Color Balance to bring up the Color Balance dialog box. Turn off the Advanced options, but leave the Smart White Balance option turned on. Turn on the Auto Proof so you can see the changes reflected in the image as you make them. Slide the slider over toward Warmer until you get a nice balance between the two images. See, that wasn't so scary, right? You can see my effort in Figure 10.18. Figure 10.18. Warming up the portrait to help it match with the indoor shot of the tree.

Blending the Two Images Together

The image of the young man looks pasted in. Of course it is, but the whole point is that it shouldn't look like it is. Depending on the images, there are probably a million techniques to help blend two images together. Because we've blurred the background photo, we can use that to our advantage by simply adding a small edge blur to the portrait. Here's how:

9.	Activate the portrait layer.
10.	Select the Magic Wand tool and click in the imagebut not anywhere near the portrait. Doing so selects the entire background.
11.	Choose Selections, Modify, Expand and set the value to 5 pixels.
12.	With the selection active, select Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur and set the Radius to 5.00, the same value as you set the expand to. You can see the final image in Figure 10.19. Figure 10.19. The final holiday portrait. Tip Done properly, you can add each family member to her own layer and print these holiday photos faster than you can say, "K-Mart holiday portraits only $19.99."