how to do photography trick

[Dale R. Hamilton]

So I have a digitial picture of a bunch of people in a group. I'd like to delete one (old girlfriend) and add to her place new wife. How do I do this without ending up with a faked looking picture?

[Norman Bernstein]

So I have a digitial picture of a bunch of people in a group. I'd like to delete one (old girlfriend) and add to her place new wife. How do I do this without ending up with a faked looking picture?

Hire my daughter, who has a Master's degree in Advertising and Marketing, and currently freelances as a graphic designer and layout artist. She knows programs like Photoshop well enough to make it look convincing.

Actually, I'm jesting.... but the point is well-taken: anyone can download a bitmap image editor, but it takes practice and finesse to use it for good effect.

[Bruce Hooke]

The short answer is use the extract tool in Photoshop to extract the person you want to remove and isolate the figure in the image of your wife and then insert the isolated image into the group shot. The "long" answer is that, as Norman said, to do this well takes a good bit of skill. To start with you need to pick a picture of your wife that has the same angle, quality and color of light (you may be able to adjust for color) as the main image. There is also the problem that most likely the outline of your wife will not match the outline of your old girlfriend in the main picture and so to cover the hole left by removing your girlfriend you might be forced to make your wife bigger in the picture than she should be, or piece in yet more filler. Then there is simply the fact that powerful image editing software like Photoshop tends to have a steep learning curve because there are a lot of options and controls. [Jeezzz there's lots of opportunities in their for double meanings in what I just wrote!]

Finally, while you may, from a technical perspective, be able to make this substitution, if this photograph has special meaning to you it is probably because of the event it was taken at and the people in the picture. There is no way to substitute out of your memory the presence of your old girlfriend at that gathering...

[Another One]

One tip - rather than deleting the entire girlfriend, you might want to try just swapping heads with the wife. This will minimize "body shape" issues and simplify the project. Good luck!

Jami

[elf]

Old girlfriend are a fact of life! They can be digitally removed but replacing them with new girlfriends will make everyone laugh who was in the picture.

The best way to get the old girlfriend out of the picture is to take a new picture!

However, if you're determined to do it, I can do it for $75/hr as long as the lighting is similar.

[KNOCKABOUT]

Seems like what you really want to do is a time travel trick...

[dmede]

Cheesy. Just accept your past as part of your life and enjoy the photo. If not, trash it and go out and make a few new memories.

[KNOCKABOUT]

...and if you figure out how to swap your wife out for your girlfriend let me know!

[Vince Brennan]

Upgrading to Wife 1.0

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 4.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving few system resources for other applications. He is also now noticing the Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as PokerNite 10.3 , Bachelor Party 2.5, and Pubnite 7.0 are no longer able to run on the system at all, causing the system to lockup when launched (even though the apps worked fine before).
Wife 1.0 provides no installation options. Thus, the installation of undesired plug-ins such as Mother-in-law 55.8 and the Brother-in-law Beta is unavoidable. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.
Some features my friend would like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:

A "don't remind me again" button.
Minimize button.
Ability to delete the "headache" file
An install feature that provides an option to uninstall 2.0 version without loss loss of other system resources.
An option to run the network driver in "promiscuous mode" allowing the the system's Hardware Probe feature to be much more useful/effective. I myself wish I had decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 3.0 Even here, however, I have found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 4.0 on top of girlfriend 3.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first, otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. Other users have told me that this is a long-standing problem that I should have been aware of. Guess that explains what happened to versions 1 and 2.
To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 3.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another identified problem is that all versions of Girlfriend have annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0!
VIRUS ALERT
All users should be aware that Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Once that happens, Mistress 1.1 won't install and you will get an "insufficient resources" error message. To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and " never" run any file transfer applications(such as Laplink) between the two systems.
FYI: Don't even think about a shared directory!!!!!!!!!

[John of Phoenix]

Yeah, he just thinks things are screwed up now - wait til he tries uninstalling Wife 1.0 .