Family Picture using Photoshop

Saw this idea on Pinterest and I have been wanting to do it for a long time now.  My mother-in law's birthday is coming up, so we thought this would be a great gift idea for her.

 



 

This was actually really simple to do if you have Adobe Photoshop.  I'm sure you could do it with other programs easily too.  This is what I did:

1. First, we had an empty picture frame and took a snap shot of each one of us holding it.  We tried holding the frame close to our face, that way we could crop away the excess parts of the picture around us.  Our sons picture was the hardest to direct, but we finally got one that worked before he threw the picture.  (Might want to take the glass out of the frame so the kids don't break it!)
2. I uploaded all the pictures into photoshop.
3. I started with the smallest picture of our cat.  I cropped close around his body and tried to keep the dimensions of the image about the same ratio as the frame (which is 11x14").  Then, I copied and pasted the image into the picture with my son.  Photoshop is great, because not only can you shrink the image and rotate it to fit into the frame, but you can skew the image too.  That way, if the frame is tilted back in one corner, you can adjust the picture to do that too. 
4. After I got our cat's picture in the frame, I cropped around my son's picture (making sure to include his entire head and the frame he was holding).  Don't forget to keep the dimensions at about the same ration as the frame you are using.
5. I then repeated the same steps noted in #3.

• If you notice, my husband's fingers went past the frame and is touching the picture of me.  It's easiest if you instruct the person holding the frame to keep their fingers off the picture part, but if they accidentally go past the frame you can just use the erase tool in photoshop.  My picture covered his fingers, so I just carefully erased that area until I could see his fingers again.  Easy fix! 
• After I was done with our pictures, I flattened all the layers on photoshop, turned it into a black and white photo, and adjusted the contrast.
• If you don't have a computer to do all this, you could probably take a picture of the person in the smallest frame, get it developed, and then take a picture of the next person holding it, but this would take a lot more time and money.  We did this in probably an hour and a half, with taking the pictures and photoshopping it.

I'll try to get step-by-step images of how I did this later in case it sounds confusing!  This was a really fun family activity to do that even our cat could get involved in :)