Picture Perfect Parents

Well, no one seemed to see anything weird, which is good. I did quite a bit of work on that picture and I wanted to make sure it wasn't obvious. The problem with spending an hour looking at one picture is that you loose the ability to objectively view it.

And actually, it isn't one picture, it's two. These two to be exact.
Over Christmas break, I had the chance to take some shots of my mom and dad. I got some nice ones of my dad and some lovely ones of my mom. Unfortunately, I didn't get one picture of them both looking nice. So I improvised.

My dad's hair would have made it easier to move his head, but the rope was in the way so I used my mom. I lassoed my mom's head, using a feather of 4. Then I pasted it onto the second picture. When I initially moved the head into place, some of the original hair showed through. Now my mom loves a lot of things about Texas but big hair isn't really her thing so I used the clone stamp to turn the hair back into the background. You can see it looks a tad odd around her head but most of that will be invisible when the second head is placed.
So lets do that.
Ah, much better. When it comes to portraits, two heads are not better than one. Now I merged the images before doing my saturation and lighting edits. I boosted the color with color curves, dodged up some sports, sharped areas and finished up with a nice crop job and voila!
Obviously, this is more work than you would want to do on every picture. But for certain shots, I think it's worth it.