What do you do when you are visiting a place and would like to get a photo of you and that special person with that breathtaking background? Such a thing happened to some friends of mine. They were on a trip and wanted a shot of them from the observation deck with the city night skyline. When they took a photo of themselves from the observation deck what they got was a photo (Photo 1) with some skyline but also the window braces, and reflections. If they went outside it was too windy to get a photo and you could not get far enough back to get a good shot without it being blurry (Photo 2). What I did was take a good photo they had of the night skyline (Photo 3) and a photo (Photo 4) they had of themselves and put the two together (Photo 5).

The steps are:

• Select the photos to be used. Some of the things to consider are the clarity of the photos and the relative size of the people and objects in the photo. You need to check for shadows on faces if you are merging the photo with another one taken at night. You also have to look at the photos to be put together to make sure they will fit and will look good together.

• Take the photo that is going to be the background and do you're enhancing, color corrections and lighting adjustments. If using a skyline make sure all the unnecessary clutter is removed from the photo. Such things as too much sky, or too much water or foreground.

• Now you need to work on the photo you are going to paste onto the background layer. What you are going to do is take your background and put another layer on that photo with only the people and a clear layer over the top of the background. Repeat the same thing you did for the background photo.

• Now you need to remove the people from the photos and get it ready for insertion on to the background photo. This is the hard part. You have to remove all the rest of the photo so that only the people you want are left. This can be done in two different ways. The first is to use the eraser tool and erase all the rest of the photo. HINT: Try using the zoom tool to enlarge the photo so you can easier see the detail and outline the people using a small eraser so that you can use a larger eraser to remove the rest of the photo. If you erase part of th picture you don't want to remove you can go the Edit and you can undo what you erased since the last time you released the mouse button.

The second is to use the lasso tool to outline the people and remove them from the photo. This takes a very steady hand and practice doing this. It will still take some clean up and the danger is that you might remove part of the people. Once you have outlined the people you need to remove, you should invert the selection under select button on the tool bar, the background. Now you can clean up around the edges of the people. Then using the magic want tool click on the white background and then repeat the invert selection and cut the people out of the picture.

• Now you bring up the background layer you selected and paste the people on the background. Using the move tool you click on the people and move them to the correct position on the background photo. By taking the corners of the box around the photo of the people you can resize the people to fit the prespective of the background. The photo is now ready to save and you should save it as a new file using the save as function.

They now have the photo they wanted and it is framed and up in their house as a reminder of their vacation.