Kenny Chesney Live Album cover

Here is the original:

Here is the cover I created:

I took the image and edited the background of it. I took out the jumbotron and added more of the crowd. I made the image black and white and adjusted the levels (option under image > adjustments). I selected the image using the rectangle marque and feathered the edges. I downloaded a font called Broken Stick from Dafont.com. I originally had the background black which looked nice but I felt like I needed to add some color. Which is why I changed it to blue.

This is where I found this image

Recreate in Illustrator - Final

Ok I brought the  live trace image from illustrator back into Photoshop. I used the selection tools and the paint bucket to fix the background to make it all one even color. I used the brush, blur and selection tools to add shadows and highlights.

Recreate using Illustrator

I decided to use an old school photo of my father. I do not know who the photographer is because it is not labeled on the back. This image has been damaged over the years and has many scratches and stains. I scanned the image and used photoshop to clean it up. Then in Illustrator I applied a customized live trace. I still need to play around with it, there is a very noticeable line in the background that I would like to remove. It appeared after the live trace. Any suggestions?

Original:

After editing in photoshop:

After live trace Illustrator: