Chapter 12. Combining and Reorganizing Your Images

In This Chapter

  • Making selections

  • Removing and replacing objects in your photos

  • Replacing boring backgrounds

  • Compositing images

You gotta love those eye-catching magazine covers. National Geographic magazine moved the Great Pyramid to create an improved composition. TV Guide gifted Oprah Winfrey with Ann-Margret's figure — literally. More recently, Newsweek featured a full-length photo of Martha Stewart based on a head shot of the home economics queen grafted onto the body of a model. It's been estimated that someone creates a new fake image in Photoshop every 30 seconds. I want to find that guy and ask him when he finds time to sleep!

Combining and Reorganizing Your Images

Perhaps you don't want to fool anyone into thinking that Forrest Gump actually received an award from John F. Kennedy. Your motives for doing some heavy-duty image manipulation are much purer. Maybe you want to add an extra wing onto your house to show around at your high school reunion. Or it's time to remove Madge from the group shot of your organization's Regional Sales Managers because Madge has been reassigned to the mail room.

Worse, you have an unsightly photo showing your mother-in-law with a tree apparently growing out of her head, and you'd be happier if the image showed just the tree. You can do that sort of thing with an image editor, such as Photoshop. The simple editing and retouching tasks that ...

Get Digital SLR Cameras & Photography For Dummies®, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.