Photo Editing with GIMP

Yesterday my youngest son and daughter-in-law dropped my granddaughter off so they could drive to Ohio in preparation for a move. I have always told my kids that they are welcome to leave their kids with us but to not be surprised if we take the kids to Disneyland. With COVID-19 that is impossible right now as the park is closed. I still wanted to send them a picture of us in Disneyland.

I searched through my phone and found a picture of the Millennium Falcon in Galaxy's Edge from our most recent trip back in September. Then I had my wife take a picture of me and my granddaughter at my work desk. The rest should be easy. Everyone always talks about Photoshop'ing people into pictures, so how hard can it be.

 My first idea was to use Microsoft Teams. I have been using it for a lot of my conference calls and rather than use my own office background, I have added a picture of the Snowbird tram to my Teams picture library. I figure I could add one of Disneyland, start up MS Teams, and take a screenshot. After playing for a bit, I decided that I didn't like my picture with my hands out reaching for the keyboard. Interestingly enough, my oldest daughter thought that I had used a Zoom background for the finished picture.

Instead I decided to try GIMP. I actually use GIMP quite frequently as it is a great little tool for editing photos and other computer graphics. Lately I have created a bunch of icons for a project at work with it. Unfortunately I have never used it to take a person (or two in this case) from one photo and add them to another. My first stop was YouTube. I watched the process where you add an alpha-channel to the photo with your people and then use the free-hand tool to trace them. Once you have them traced, you cut out the background. That looked really tough and so I searched for another video in case there is a trick to use. The second video showed multiple tricks. First, make the picture really large so you can see the fine edges. You can then drag the free-hand lines to fit the outline of the people better. The second video also suggested going in sections so you are pulling off a bit at a time.

I didn't really care that I did a great job creating the fake photo. In fact I wanted it to be fairly obvious that I had created the picture. Then I stumbled upon some more tricks that make my fake actually look pretty good. One is that I cut out my granddaughter and myself from a fairly large picture. Then I shrunk us down before pasting us into the Disneyland background. Shrinking the photo removed a lot of the imperfections from my cutting out the background. Then I only used a section of the picture above my waist so you couldn't tell I was sitting in my office chair. The finished photo actually turned out pretty good even though I didn't mean it to.

Once I finished the picture, I Air Dropped it to my phone and then texted it out to the family. My oldest daughter replied almost instantly with her suggestion on how I pulled off the faked picture. I got a few laughs from everyone.

Now that I know how to Photoshop someone into a picture, it is not that difficult. I'm sure there are a ton of tricks to make the photo turn out even much better than I did and I encourage you to do some Internet searching. I don't know how to make hair look more natural but figure it is just a matter of patience and choosing a picture with a well-combed head. Today my wife and I will be taking my granddaughter to Paris. Wanna come?