Graduation and Small Trick in Photoshop

Taken at my wife’s graduation ceremony. Congratulation, my dear~ 🙂
And I will show you a small trick on how to enhance you photo by combining two or more photos.

As you see, I found my wife’s eyes were half closed, and I did not know until I downloaded to my computer. Of course, I am not happy with this picture, so I need to fix it, and Photoshop is really handful at this time.
I started choosing other pictures and I found this:

This picture is good because the background and lighting are really similar to my original picture. (You should always take couple pictures with same sense, otherwise you may find it is very difficult to match all the details such as lighting.)

Once I have pictures that I want to combine, then open photoshop and open both pictures in layers. In my example, I opened my original picture, then added the other picture to the layer. If you are following, you should see layer 1 is totally cover the background layer. Lower the opacity for layer 1 to 50%, so you can easily to see layer 1 and background. Adjust layer 1 so that you layer 1’s target match background target. In my case, I will try to match position of my wife’s head in both pictures. After you have done this step, change the opacity of layer 1 to 100%.

Then I added a layer mask with filled color (press alt+”layer mask” button), and now you should only see the background layer because the layer 1 is masked out.

Now use brush Tool (B), and choose white color. Make sure you are working on the layer mask. Painting the area you want to correct, and portion of layer 1 will appear again. If you make a mistake, switch to black color, and paint on the mistake area, and it will masked out the mistake area. (click the picture below to see how will it looks while painting the layer mask with white brush)