Edited Self Portrait

I wasn't able to do much to my original image. It looks like I forgot to save a copy as a psd. file, so I only had the jpeg. version to work with. The first thing I did was to try and take away the black outline around the wedding photo. I used the smudge tool for this, which seemed to work pretty well. Then I used the magic wand tool to select the area between my husband and I in the wedding photo, where someone had mentioned a lamp post that was out of place. I played around with the brightness and contrast until I got an image that resembled the lighting of the background. Then I used the smudge tool again to soften the edges of my husband and I, and also to smudge the altered section so that you couldn't tell there was a lamp post in the background. I tried to do something about the blurred trees in the background, but that didn't work out so I cropped it, but I've also uploaded the before image since I'm not sure which one I like better. I also went back in both of them and made the whole image darker. I like the darker effect, and now that someone had mentioned it, I'm really glad that the lamp post is gone. I really wish I could have changed a lot more things, but for what I could do I definitely thinks it looks a little bit stronger.