Removing Backgrounds

[laawaaris]

I shot a 2-year olds birthday party - and the mom asked me to remove the backgrounds from 3 of the photos.

I worked on these fotos in PS, but I particularly had trouble with the first one. Its a cute photo IMO, but when I removed the background - it makes her hand (which is blurry to begin with) look fairly odd. Is there any way to sharpen just that hand (meaning bring detail back into it?)

I'm posting the before and after for each of the 3. Let me know what you guys think. I hope they are not too small to examine.

[sjordan]

I think the blurry hand would do much better with a dark background

[CaptainTom]

I'd do a bit of surgery, and remove the blurry hand all together.

[Kathi]

Completely agree with Tom. Think outside the rectangle though and take it one step further - remove the hand and then crop it tighter to make a square, tightly cropped headshot image.

[laawaaris]

hey guys, thanks - i think the suggestions are good ... i made some crops and performed some surgery as well ... gives some fairly nice results !!!

i once went to a workshop by Craig Tanner - and he showed us a shot that he took when he was holding a bird ... thing is the shot was taken with a LensBaby 2.0 ... so naturally EVERYTHING was out of focus, except for his thumb ... he only told us this after he showed us the processed shot, which looked like everything was in focus and fairly sharp, including the bird and the rest of his hand ...

at that time, i didn't think to ask him exactly how he did that, but now that I am starting to work with this type of photo, i wish I did!

I had some thoughts in my head to use the Clone tool, in combination with some other tools to try to bring more definition to her hand. But usually the results I come up with are too smooth, and have less texture than what I want.

I also know of a software called Focus Magic - but I only thought of that this morning after I began to think more seriously about the hand.

Anybody brought the focus into an out-of-focus object before?

[CaptainTom]

I just downloaded Focus Magic to try it out. I cannot use it because it says I have used my ten free trials and must register..... Go figure.... I'm not buying until I test drive it.

[laawaaris]

yeah it says the same thing for me too ... its supposed to be good however and is not overtly expensive ...