Removing objects from your photos

So, what’s on the agenda for today!?  I have a little tutorial for you from Becky over at Finding My Creativity!  What can I say about Becky?  Hmmmm, where do I begin?  I’ve been following and corresponding with her for quite some time now and she is just one sweet mama!  That’s right, she’s a mama to the beautiful little girl you see in the blog header below!  Adorable right?  She’s also one unbelievably talented photographer!  If you haven’t visited her bloggy site, you are missing out!  I hope you’ll take the time to hop on over and visit Miss Becky!  I’m sure you’ll find some fun posts to read and gorgeous pictures to ogle!  Enjoy!

Hi guys! First of all, thanks so much to Elena for letting me guest post! I'm so excited!!! This is my very first guest post!  Anyhoo, I told her that I would probably do a tutorial remembering that I had just removed an electric pole from a 4th of July picture of my niece.  Personally I don't think you can tell, it's not perfect, but in a pinch this works. If I had more time I would've zoomed in and gotten more detailed.

Of course you do lose some of the stroller behind her, but if you didn't know what it looked like you probably wouldn't notice.  Here's the before:

I really loved this picture of her, but the pole was an issue so I did something that I learned over on Ashley Sisk's blog. She has some very useful tutorials and if you ever have a moment you should dig around! So anyhoo, I opened up PSE10 because when you open up CS5 you have to put your big girl pants on and I just couldn't find mine ;0) Seriously. PSE holds your hand but CS5 will laugh in your face!!! So I opened my photo file and followed these steps:

1. create duplicate layer
2. choose the rectangular marquee tool and select an area on the opposite side of the picture from the pole.

2. Next hit ctrl + j to create a new layer out of the section that was selected.
3. Then hit ctrl + g to connect the new layer with the duplicate layer that you created in the first step.
4. Next select the move tool and move the selection over in front of the pole.

I did flip mine so it was reverse and stretched it out a bit so that the street lines would line up better.

5. Now knock down the opacity of the new layer so that you can still see it a bit, but you can see under it as well because now you're going to take the eraser tool and erase away parts that you don't want. Choose a soft brush to do this so there aren't any hard lines.
6.Take the opacity back to 100% and now you will see that there is still a line to take care of. This is when I like to use the clone tool. You can use the spot healing tool, but I don't usually like the effect that it has on images. It's up to you. I chose the clone tool then chose a section that I would like to copy by alt+clicking on the spot and then I just painted the areas that needed to be painted.
7. Merge all of the layers and then save. I did do some other editing to the pic, but that's a whole other tutorial :0).

 
Thanks again, hope this was helpful to someone ;0)!!!