Just wondering what you think about the background on this one. Would you just make it solid?

Also, how would you go about removing the texture on the photo without too much blurring? I tried some different blur filters, but really couldn't get what I was looking for. I want it to look like a photo, not a drawing ;)

BTW - This is a pic of my mom and her older sister and older brother.

EDIT: Can't really see the texture on the jpeg, but it's there. The photo is printed on textured stock. The original tif has a honeycomb looking texture to it.

Hi!

I would tell you that the best way to handle your texture issue is to make a copy of the layer, then use dust and scratches filter (play with the numbers to get your desired effect), apply a layer mask to the now filtered layer, and reveal only the parts that you want blurred......also, you can adjust the opacity of the layer, being that it's a separate layer. Hope that helps! Good luck.

Most time the texture on photos is equally spaced dots. If you see this and if you have the original photo, re-scan using the De-screen feature on the scanner. The other approach if you can't re-scan is to use the FFT filter in Pohotoshop.

Tammy, for the texture you could go through the trouble of running an FFT Filter but I have found for this type of texture you can eliminate it quickly with a good Noise Filter like Noiseware. As for the background, this image lends itself well to the Extract Filter in Photoshop. I spent less than 60 secs being very sloppy and it did a good job. You could replace the background and desaturate or add a colored background and colorize the subjects.
Regards, Murray

Hi there

Maybe just turn the backgound into a pattern.

I just used a marquee selection flipped and merged then flipped and merged again... then copied across and used a mask to apply.

Butch

EDIT: Can't really see the texture on the jpeg, but it's there. The photo is printed on textured stock. The original tif has a honeycomb looking texture to it.
FFT tute/thread (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/rp-tutorials/10911-using-fft-filter-remove-photgraphic-paper-texture.html)
Good example of what it can do IMO (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/112265-post86.html) :)

Thanks for all the great suggestions :)

I used the FFT filter to remove the texture. I created a patterned background.

What do you think?

The first thing that I did was convert to B&W and used the blue channel to preserve detail in the young lady.

Next I ran Neat Image on the whole photograph.
I then selected the people and copied them to a new layer.
To the background layer I used an aggressive median blur filter
I added color back