Family Photo Touchups - Civl War Edition!

One thing I really enjoy is touching up photos. Whether its simply fixing a few small mistakes or completely repairing a damaged photo, I really enjoy it. The other day my family and I decided to get old fashioned portraits taken. It was a lot of fun, however, none of the group photos turned out nice. The photographer missed a lot of things so none of those photos were useable. There were good photos of us individually so I decided to make my own family photo. Since these photos were shot with a busy background, the toughest part was to cut out each member of my family. Normally for something like this I would key out the background, or use the magic wand to help to get rid of chunks of the background, but these backgrounds were so busy I had to mask out each person individually. Initially I was going to fuse the backgrounds from each image together, but as I soon found out, parts of the background overlapped ,which resulted in me being completely behind my mom and my brother basically sitting on my dad's shoulder. Instead I looked for a Civl War era background before finally finding the one I used. After that, all that was left was to make sure that each person was the correct size and then fix the lighting so it matched the background. From there I was able to add an old paper texture to the background, toss in a vignette, and add some light scratches and dust to sell that this photo was an older photo. I like how it turned out, what do you think?

~Josh