Photomerge edits

[chickpea67]

I recently downloaded photoshop elements and am having difficulties figuring everything out. I took this photo and originally, the girl was in the bright sunshine. I was able to do a photomerge to get an less brightly lit face from a similar photo, but now i'm having trouble blending the two. How do I go about this?

[edbayani]

i don't know how different elements is from cs2. but i think you have layers. the joint in your shirt is not aligned, there is an abrupt change in the folds. you can use layermask with a soft, low opacity brush to blend them. you can switch back and forth with the black and white. after you have blended them well, you can still fine tune with the clone tool with a soft and low opacity brush carefully choosing your source point. the other problem would be the bluish cast of the shirt in some areas. choose both the shirt of the father and son and desaturate to make it even. you can also choose the brightly lit part of the girl's face and put it in another layer and adjust with levels and maybe hue and saturation to balance the color. again with layermask blend this layer with the original layer.

[chickpea67]

Oh wow. Your edits make the picture look so much better! I will go home tonight and try to recreate them. I can tell its going to be a steep learning curve. Do you use photoshop for all of your editing or only for the tougher pictures?

[edbayani]

i've never used any other photo editing software except photoshop. i started with photoshop 3 when i got my first computer. glad you liked what i did.