Removing

It happens in the best of familiessomeone creeps into the family portrait who really shouldn't be there. Maybe it's your former spouse, or your kid's current attraction with the green punk hairdo, leather vest, and nose ring. Well, whoever it is, you can usually get him or her out of the picture more easily with Photoshop than in the flesh. Figure 22.15 was shot at a trade show. The man in the foreground had a striped shirt that photographed with a moir pattern, and there's a woman in a bright red shirt mostly hidden who might as well not be there.

Figure 22.15. Nice shirt, but it didn't photograph well.

I'm going to remove the woman, and turn the striped shirt into a nice even gray. The first step is to select the shirt. In Figure 22.16, I've used the Magic Wand and Lasso tools to isolate the stripes. I've also applied a small amount of the Lens Blur filter to them. This makes the stripes blend into each other. Because it's only applied to the shirt, the rest of the photo remains sharp.

Figure 22.16. Yipes! No more stripes.

This next piece is even easier. I can just copy a piece of the background from above the woman's head and slide it down. Figure 22.17 shows the picture after removing the extraneous bystander.

Figure 22.17. It's as if she were was never even in the room.

The fixes required took only a couple of minutes, and definitely improved the picture. This kind of " candid " photo almost always has something in it that you wish wasn't there. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop and a few minutes of work, you can make all of your pictures perfect.

Putting Back What Was Never There

The Maritime Museum in Halifax, NS, has a thoroughly intriguing Titanic exhibit; particularly interesting is the deck chairone of a handful that survived the sinking. It's shown in Figure 22.18. Having been accused at least once of some uselessaction like "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic ," it seemed as if I should take the opportunity to do so. I would like my deck chair somewhere on a nice sandy beach .

Figure 22.18. The deck chairs on the Titanic were solid oak. Having the fake deck under this one will make selecting it tricky.

The best way to select the chair seems to be to use the Magic Wand at a fairly low tolerance. I'm still going to pick up some of the floor, but I can hold the Option/Alt key down while I use the Lasso to circle and remove unwanted planks. See Figure 22.19.

Figure 22.19. It takes a good deal of patience to select just the chair.

I ended up using the Magnetic Lasso as well as the Magic Wand and the regular Lasso. Enlarging the image helped a lot, too, but it's still a test of one's patience. Finally, with the chair completely selected, I simply cut it out of the picture, and place it on a nice sandy beach I shot on the same trip. Because I didn't like the way it faced, I flipped it and distorted it a little so it would look more natural. Finally, a drop shadow on the chair layer adds a bit of realism , and I copied and pasted some of those strange weeds over the chair (see Figure 22.20).

Figure 22.20. The final result.

The point of these exercises is that there's no picture too damaged, or too full of interlopers, to rescue. The only limit to what you can do with your pictures is your own imagination .