Now You See It, Now You Don't

Ever had the experience of taking a photo of something, like a view of a garden, the horizon, or the beach but there are people walking across in front of you thus blocking the view or adding unnecessary noise to your photograph?


You wait patiently for people to get out of your way to take that perfect picture. Some see you and move away with an apologetic smile. Others.... they see you but just take their time and won't budge at all!



Well, this happened to me during my yearly Mother's Day visit to the Chicago Botanic Gardens. We didn't really get to go on Mother's Day because it rained. We went the following weekend. I wanted to take lots of pictures and practice using the Nikon D80. DH has been nagging me about learning how to use it. I was content with my Olympus but learning how to use a different one is OK.



In this picture there was this woman and a child who blocked my view. They were not aware I was behind them so I waited patiently. The little boy went to the side and the mother followed suit. HA! My chance, I thought. But alas! not quite out of my view. I took the shot anyway as DH said there are more people coming our way. Wouldn't this have been a perfect shot?

I didn't fret. I knew with the use of Photoshop I can re-touch this picture... so here you see it, now you don't....
I used PS8 for this tutorial. What I did: I cloned the areas to the right side of the woman to erase her from my picture. In my picture, I copied a portion of the tree to replace the woman's head and torso, the ground underneath the tree to replace her hips, and the grass to replace her legs. Then I carefully copied the edge of the walkway to replace her shoes.Zoom in to the area you want to re-touch. In the Tool Box, choose the CLONE STAMP tool, it is the 5th box down in the first column. Make the diameter/size of the stamp tool manageable [small or big enough to copy the pixels next to the area you want to clone]. Press ALT key [notice that the cursor changed shape- like a target or bull's eye]. Bring the cursor to the area you want to clone. Left click while depressing the ALT key. Then release ALT key and bring the cursor to the area you want to erase or replace. Left click and move your mouse around to clone the area you selected [notice that the cursor changed into a small circle and a plus sign. The plus sign is where you are copying, the circle is where you are replacing.]



Here are other pictures where I used the Clone Stamp Tool. Original picture below, the ball was cut-off the camera's view. I looked for another picture with a complete view of the ball, merged the picture side by side so I could clone the ball.
In so doing, I also cloned some areas of the backdrop.


I didn't stop there. I cloned another ball so N. will have her own. Take note that the brand name of the ball is on top - that's because I rotated the clone so it will look like it's a different ball!


The possibilities are endless! So go ahead, clone yourself a twin!