Isolating an Image

Have you ever had a photo you loved, and felt it belonged in a portrait type image, rather than the candid image it was? I find this happens often. Here is an example of an image isolation I did of my son.

Here is the After:

And this is the before:
(Well, semi before, my daughter was in the image but blinking and I had already cropped and edited it to some degree, but you get the idea)