Is your favorite photo of a relative that one where everyone else is in the way? This happens a lot so most people who work with photographs have a "stash" of digital files they fondly call "backgrounds." You can make your own using fairly plain digital paper from a digital scrapbooking kit. Just turn it black and white to use with B&W pics, or change the color and tint to make it work with your color photos. A marvelous set of tools exist in Photoshop Elements and Photoshop to help extract a person from a group without touching scissors to your picture, so it's not as tedious or destructive a task as in days gone by. Add a bit of shading around the edges of the entire photo or just the background if desired and you may just end up with a an amazing new portrait of your ancestor! Just remember that scans of group photos need to be at a higher resolution to ensure your ability to print the cropped photo at your desired size. That means measuring the height of the person you want to extract, figure out how large you want to print the final photo, do the math and scan appropriately. Same size = 300 dpi, twice as large = 600 dpi, three times as large = 900 dpi or more, etc.
