Making a Cover from old Photos in Photoshop

A distant cousin of mine has made a family tree. He wants me to design the cover for it. He has given me a photo of a page of his famly Bible where births in the family have been recorded.

You can see the image below. It has been taken with a mobile phone camera. Notice that there is a large tear in the page.

This is the other image. It is of an illustrious ancestor of his who lived here in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His ancestor has a tanpura, which is a stringed Indian instrument. The strings are strummed in a set scale. The photo is old discolored and falling to pieces.

This is all I have. Let me see what can be done.

Step 1 : I will first move the figure to the page of the Bible with the Move Tool.

Step 2 : The Move Tool is shown. I will use it to drag it over on the page of the Bible.

Step 3 : The page of the Bible is almost completely covered.

Step 4 : The next thing to be done is to check the 'Show Transform Controls'. This is Photoshop CS 2. In Photoshop Shop7 it is called 'Bounding Box' and is located in the same place.

Step 5 : I have dragged at the corner handles and manouvered it into place over the tear.

Step 6 : Now I will use the Elliptical Marquee Tool.

Step 7 : You can see the selectrion made with the Elliptical Marquee Tool surrounding the figure with the tanpura.

Step 8 : I have clicked the Layer Mask Button and a Layer Mask has been formed. See above.

Step 9 : As you can see I have again used the Move Tool to reposition the figure with the tanpura over the tear.

Step 10 : I have now gone to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur.

Step 11 : When the Gaussian Blur dialogue box has appeared I have dragged the slider at the bottom to the right to blur the edges of the figure with the tanpura.

Step 12 : This is how it now looks.

Step 13 : In the Layers/Channels/Paths palette I have changed the Blend Mode to Multiply.

Step 14 : I have again gone to the Layers/Channels/Paths palette and dragged the Opacity Slider to the left. This has decreased the opacity.

Step15 : The figure with the tanpura now blends with the page of the Bible. The tear is visible but is not so jarring. I just posted this to this blog to show how I did it.

The completed cover. The tear is no longer visible. I made a new layer above the Backround and used the color picker to sample color from the figure with the tanpura. I then used the Paint Bucket to fill it with the color. I then reduced the opacity of this new layer to 20 per cent. Lastly I used the Brightness/Contrast to give the final touch. I hope you like it. You can click the image above to see a larger one.