Sometimes the objects in our pictures look good, but yet there seems to be missing something. Something that would make this photo really stand out, showcasing its object with flair. If you encounter such a picture in your camera roll, have you ever considered changing the background, and exchanging it for something different altogether?

For instance, here’s a picture of our choir with a fun enhanced background:

Below is the original: it was taken under less than ideal lighting conditions due to our low-lit practice room and a “snap-shot camera”. The room itself had nothing but dark colors and had little else to catch one’s attention in a favorable way. And yet, at the moment it was the only photo we had with all of us present. So, I changed our background to liven it up a bit. Here’s another variation with a digital background:

Of course you don’t have to use abstract digital art – a nice landscape will do just as well! 🙂

These changes don’t make it a beautiful picture all of a sudden – but, it does add at least some “pizzazz”…

Another example. I love photographing my cute little long-haired guinea pigs. They make for ideal top models by the way: they hardly move once they notice that thing you keep pointing at them (what could it be?!) and they even let you change small things in their poses, like lifting their chins a little bit, or stretching their legs just so. 🙂

Take Sh’eilah for instance. I took a picture of her which is lovely in and of itself – mostly because she is lovely no matter how or where you take her picture ;-).

Anyway, the background was a bit dull, so I removed it all together – or rather, I cut Sh’eilah from her original background and pasted her onto a green digital abstract. This makes the pic rather more flamboyant – and its object a true Top Model, imho.

When I want to copy the object in one photo and paste it into the next (always create a new layer!), I make sure my selection tool “leaves some room” between the selection I drew – this way I create kind of a “blurry” selection line, which makes it way more easy to blend the object in with its new background.

And last but not least, you can combine digital photo editing with scrapbooking or making cards, by making sure you choose photo backgrounds that will match with the color scheme of your design paper stack. Like I did with the pictures for my Tag card in Red. I already showed you the example below in that post; if you want to see how the rest of the pictures turned out, go check out that blog post (of deze in het Nederlands) and watch the video!

By the way, I’m using Paintshop Pro XI for these kind of edits.

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