Edit Me Challenge 2012~Week 19 and a Field of Dreams

This week's photo challenge is from Andi over at The Hollie Rogue.

I don't normally do edits of people (because I'm not good at them), but when I saw this photo, it got my creative juices flowing, so I took the challenge : ) I loved that she looked like a fairy princess lost in a child's fantasy. I wanted to give her a soft and dreamy background to add to the look of a fantasy, but I have never transposed part of a picture onto another picture. I didn't let that stop me though, so I took what knowledge I had of Elements9 and combined it with my knowledge of PicMonkey and came up with this...

Sometimes I get so carried away with an edit, I forget to write the steps down, but I think I pretty much remember the steps, so here goes...

First off, I opened the picture in PicMonkey so I could lighten it up in Curves. Then I added the Tranquil effect which made her look dreamy like the background I planned to add her to.

Second, I opened the edited photo in Elements9 and used the magic wand to trace the child, then I right clicked and selected "Layer via Copy" and that created a new layer of just the outlined child. I deleted the background layer and was left with the layer of the child.

Third, I opened the background picture which was already edited, and placed the layer of the child on it. I pressed Ctrl+T to transform the child layer so I could enlarge and move it around to my liking, and then I flattened the layer and saved it.

Fourth, the cut out of the child was a bit rough, so I had to take it back to PicMonkey and use the clone tool to get rid of the extra bits that were outlining the child, that was where all the work was, but I stuck with it and was pleased with the results. Once the cloning was done, I think I lightened it once again. Finally, I decided to add some text to title it, field of dreams : ) and that was that!

Edit: I've edited this post to show the original background, and the original addition of the child before I cloned out the rough edges of cutting her out of the original photo. It took a lot of cloning to clean it up, so if anyone knows an easier and cleaner way to cut out part of a photo to transpose onto another photo, I would greatly appreciate your advice : )

If you love to edit photos, you should check out this group, just click below...


Thanks for this week's photo challenge Andi.