Photos From Hell #5: Top of Head Cut Off

My mom is a big fan of the Olympic skater, Ilia Kulik. She was thrilled to get her picture taken with him backstage at an ice show recently, but the woman who took the shot cut off the top of Ilia's head. My mom was not happy. The picture is shown greatly reduced in size below so you can see what I mean. 

Fortunately, my mom had taken a photo of Ilia with another fan, and she did get his entire head into the shot. Although he is facing the other way, the top of his head is included in the second shot, as you can see below.

 

What I had to do to salvage the picture for my mom was extend the top of the image a bit. I did Edit, Expand Canvas, and expanded 50 pixels on the Top only, canvas color=black.

Next I "borrowed" the top of Ilia's head by making a lasso selection from the spare image. I selected all the way down to his eyebrows so I'd have reference points for lining up with the image to be repaired. 

I copied the selection into the Clipboard, then pasted it into the image to be repaired, then flipped it horizontally. I was careful to line up the eyebrows in the pasted object with the eyebrows underneath.

You can see above that since the object was selected from an image with different lighting, it has slightly lighter skin tones and eyebrow color than is appropriate for this image. So I selected the Object Paint Eraser with the default brush size and a very soft edge, and erased carefully to just above the eyebrows. Then I hit the Quick Color Controls' sun key's minus (-) sign 2X to darken the skin tones .

I right clicked, Merge All. Then I used the Blur Retouch tool, Slight Blur preset, to click along the edges of the join between the object and the original image. Next I used the Burn Retouch Tool, Wide Burn Preset, to click a few times on the top of Ilia's forehead to darken the lighter skin just a hair more. Here's the final result. 

If you didn't know the top of his head was missing in the original photo, you probably would never guess that the image had been edited so extensively. And my mom thinks I'm a genius! 

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