I took some portraits of a friend of mine above in my pre-digital days and I was very satisfied with the results at the time. I have always liked the composition of the shot, but I felt that I could do much more with it digitally and I set about "Cutting Up Anne Marie" using Adobe Photoshop 5. I decided to use a technique that I have seen before, so I cannot claim this as an exclusive idea. However, I think it does demonstrate that old portraits can be given a new lease of life with a little thought and a creative approach. I scanned the slide at home on my CanoScan 2700f film scanner at the highest resolution of 2700 pixels per inch (PPI)

The first task was to remove Anne Marie from the background as I wanted to have control of the background colour. You can do this in a number of ways, but as the background colour was so different from the rest of the image I found the magic wand tool below worked perfectly.

Before selecting the background it is essential that you call up the layers palette (F7) to rename the background layer by double clicking on the Thumbnail. Photoshop will not allow you to make a transparency of your background image unless you give it another name.

Feather the edge of your selection before cutting, copying or pasting by selecting the feather command, which is found via Select-Feather on the menu bar. The degree of feather will depend on the ppi you are working in, but at 300ppi 2-3 pixels was about right. While we are striving to produce sharp pictures, softening the edge of a part of the image may not appear to be that logical. However, the edges between objects even on a bitingly sharp image are softer than you realise. Trust me! I'm a Digital Photographer. Some cut and pastes look artificial and in a lot of cases it is because the edges are too sharp. The soft edge is much more believable and essential for good quality work. Once the selection is complete and the feather radius is set, choose the cut command to remove the background or hit the shortcut keys Ctrl+X. See Below

The choices of backgrounds that are open to the digital worker are enormous, but you need to ensure that you do choose a complimentary colour for your image. I chose a graduated green which I created using the gradation tool. You first need to create a new blank layer beneath your transparency by clicking the centre icon at the bottom of the layers palette. Select the foreground and background colour of your choice and create your gradation as we show below.

I chose to do mine from corner to corner rather than top to bottom and I also added a little shading to the edges using the gradation tool again. If you make a new background in Photoshop and include photographic subjects like this portrait, it can look a little false especially when printed. All photographs contain grain and to be really convincing your background needs to have the same look. The trick here is to add a small amount of noise just to the background to match the rest of your subject. Add noise via Filter-Noise-Add Noise available from the menu bar. The amount varies depending on resolution, but at 300 ppi I found that 6 was sufficient. Once completed I merged Anne Marie and the background together via Merge-Visible.

To cut up Anne Marie into the individual Slides and prints I first needed to scan a strip of 35mm film and a medium format negative using a flat bed scanner. I made them into transparencies as shown below using the same process already described for making a transparency of Anne Marie.

I dragged and dropped the slide templates into the main image and then made a number of copies of each one. To copy a layer, drag your thumbnail over the centre icon at the bottom of the layers palette. Each of the slides needed to be on a separate layer of their own, which did mean that I had a lot of layers, but it allowed me much more control over each part. I placed the slides in positions over my portrait, then using the Edit-Transform-Rotate tool I turned each slide to give the scattered appearance. I deliberately left a couple of blank areas, which would become small prints later .

The next stage was to make each slide template into a small piece of the picture. In other words I now needed to put a small part of the portrait into each slide. To do this I turned off all the layers except one slide template and using the magic wand tool I selected the inside of the slide.

With the selection made I then switched to the layer containing the portrait. The selection remains active and available on any layer you select. I chose Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste just a small section of the portrait. Adobe Photoshop will paste your selection to a new layer and that layer now needs to be merged with the slide template. Make sure only the Slide template and your copied section of the portrait are visible before choosing Merge Visible from the layers menu.

That process must now be repeated for every slide template. To make the small prints I made a selection using the square Marquee tool and rotated that selection by choosing Select-Transform- Selection from the menu bar. After positioning the selection where I wanted it, I used the same copy and paste technique described for the slides.

At this stage the majority of the hard work had been done and I chose to get rid of the original slide templates that I had been copying from. I also removed the original portrait of Anne Marie to leave me with just my newly created Slides in my layers palette, but I kept the 35mm single frame template for use on my background.

I then created a new gradation on a blank layer to form this background. By choosing Edit-Transform-Scale I was able to size the remaining single 35mm slide template to fit the background, reducing the opacity in the layers palette. There are a number of different options open at this stage. The slides could be given some shadows to create more depth to the picture or the individual slides could be moved a little. This is the advantage of keeping every slide on a separate layer. Every one can be moved independently of each other. I decided to add a shadow to my slides by copying each one, adding Gaussian blur to the copy beneath and moving each a little with the move tool. I felt happy with my image at this stage, but before I flattened the image, which amalgamates all the layers together I saved my file with the layers intact. If you have the storage space try to keep your newly created image in it's layers form for as long as possible. If you find that you want to make a slight change a few days later, it can be easily done. Once flattened that option is gone.