You know, sometimes you take a couple pictures of the same shot hoping to get a good one, and often times this person looks great in one photo while the other person, not so much. My dad never smiled in photos, so when he does, we cross our fingers that everyone else looks good. Not usually the case. I took two shots of my parents with this exact scenario. Here are those original shots:
One good photo of my mom, one good of my dad. But since they aren’t in the same photo, time to whip out the good old magnetic lasso. This is just one way of doing it, but it usually works for me.
I’ll set the feather in the top tool bar to 20 px. This will give me a much softer edge to my selection to help the photos blend together. Since my dad is in the foreground, I’m going to select him instead of my mom. And I’m only concerned about being accurate in the space between them. The rest of the picture to the right doesn’t really matter. Use the lasso and then copy.
Now I’ll go back to the first photo that’s good of my mom and simply paste my selection. My dad’s new position won’t match with his previous, but that’s ok. I’ll just shift him closer to my mom until it looks right.
I got lucky here because the background is dark enough that you can’t tell anything has changed. If you notice in this combined photo, I’ve also edited the faces a little. By using the Healing brush tool, I’ve eliminated the bags under both my parent’s eyes. Because the bags under my dad’s eyes are so dramatic, I didn’t want to erase them all together, so you can see still them a little in the final photo.
