6/27/16

Changing a Photo Background with PicMonkey

Every year on his birthday, Steve takes Trevor's portrait. Trevor holds a wooden number, drawn, cut and painted white by my dad. For ten years, I've been planning to create a collage of these birthday portraits. For ten years, I've been picturing it in mind. It would be awesome, except for one thing. Trevor is against a black background every year except when he turned three. For some reason, I let Steve photograph Trevor against a mottled gray background that year. I didn't realize it was a mistake until it was too late.

Here's the collage (created in under five minutes using PicMonkey), with empty spaces for a title and journaling.


I know some people would just live with the gray, but it bothers me way too much. It occurred to me that there might be a way to solve the problem with PicMonkey. I'm constantly learning new things I can do with it. Sure enough! I started by using PicMonkey's Design tab to make a solid black rectangle. I added it as an overlay, then erased the black to reveal the image of Trevor. Using different sizes of brushes, I cleaned up the edges. It's not perfect, but I am SO happy with how it came out!

Here's the before and after:


Check out how much better the collage looks with the uniform backgrounds! 


Believe it or not, everything I did is available with the free version of PicMonkey. But at only $33/year, my PicMonkey Royale membership has already paid for itself a thousand times over and I would happily pay it simply to support the free version. It's that awesome. PicMonkey offers a free trial 30-day of their Royale Membership. That's how I started, although it took only a day before I was ready to commit to the $33. I love PicMonkey!

3 comments:

  1. Love love love how you changed that background! LOVE seeing him grow up over the years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. That looks SO much better. Totally would have driven me crazy as well.

    ReplyDelete

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