Photoshopping Soren's class pic

So school ended last month and -- hey, Soren's in school already?!? Not to worry, we're not cramming his head full of math drills. It's only "playschool," where he interacts three hours once a week with other little people and gets messy with the featured art project. However, it is a program of Peninsula College, so that should look good on his resume... ;-)

Soren was the youngest kid in his class -- most of the ten other kids were two years old, with some threes -- and I'm afraid this immaturity shows in the class photo.

After the particularly wiggly photo shoot, I got involved in reviewing the digital pictures, and we were chagrined but not surprised to discover there was no frame in which each child's face was showing. We're not talking about kids not looking at the camera, we're talking about only seeing the back of their head because they were twisting around to complain to their mommy about sitting still for so long.

So I offered to try some Photoshopping magic, and here's what I did. I took one image where a good half of the kids were looking (not Soren, alas -- see front row, left)...
...and I layered another pretty good photo on top of it (where Soren is indeed facing the camera, but trying to spin out of my iron grip) and used the "erase" tool to make the lower layer visible. You'll have to believe me that the erased patches below contained other squirmy kids whose charming faces were not at their best.
Then the tricky part of smoothing and blurring the edges of the transitions and rebuilding some patches of clothing (thankfully solid-colored) where the two photos did not match up well. If only I had kept my right knee down in the first photo... It was hard work to recreate the jean bottom of the little boy behind me and to the viewer's left, as well as his mother's sleeve.
But when the final image (above) was printed as a 5x7, none of the other moms could find the Photoshopped areas, which means I succeeded!

Oh, how long did this take? You shouldn't ask. I told myself "one hour" when I sat down at the computer, but of course it took two. Soren, I'm not doing this every year!!