How to "Airbrush" or remove unwanted objects from your photo with Photoshop

[moylan]

In this Post I am going to try and demonstrate how i learnt to do this. There may be other ways, but this is the way that i use all the time.
What you need to know is that the "Cloning Stamp" is your Friend. This is the absolutely most powerful tool for this sort of thing. For demonstration purposes i will use my "Infamous" Lighthouse Pic.


http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/LightHouseoriginal.jpg


First thing i usually do is zoom right in on where i am editing, but it will be your preference.


When you have decided what you want taken out of the picture, one of the first things to do is look at the area surrounding it, and decide what exactly is behind this object(s) that you wish to remove. In this lighthouse picture, it is wuite easy to see what is behind it because the fence is pretty well transparent, the only thing that i had to be creative with is behind the truck, but we'll get to that.

Ok, so we will do the sky behind the fence first. This is very easy, as the sky surrounding this fence isnt very dynamic. So i grab the Cloning Stamp, and to choose the target from which i intend to clone from, i hold Alt + Click on the intended area. I target about a bit more than a "Fence-length" above the fence and Alt +click. I then Choose a "Normal" sized brush (about 21px) and put it on about 25% hardness, this is fairly important so as to not show really visible seams from where you have been cloning. Even after that, it is slightly visible that colour has changed at the end of where I have cloned.

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/lesson%20for%20airbrushing/Afterfirstrunoverfence.jpg

So now i have to change the opacity to about 20%-30% and select another target and just go over the edges of the seam to make it disappear, you may need to choose several to get it seamless.

Note: It is very useful to create Snapshots every few minutes so if you stuff up and cant undo back far enough, you can just whip out the history brush and go back to where you want

Now comes a bit harder part, taking the fence, and especially the truck, out from the front of the lighthouse. What you need to do once again is see what would be directly behind those objects, sometimes you have to just be creative and just put what you think would look right. We'll start by removing the fence from the tower. You will notice there is a little window behind the fence. this one is easy, seeing as there is another window exactly the same above it, and can also use the whole area around the window to take the fence away from that whole bottom section of the tower.

So I target the very top and middle of the window. now since this is a little more intricate, i cut my brush size to around 10 px. Since i targeted the very top and middle of the window, i now start in exactly the same place on the subject window. once the fence is gone, i have to go over it again, as the shadow is not in proportion. This time, i gradually get less and less opacity as i get further into the shadow. its not perfect, but if you are not looking for it, it is unnoticeable.

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/lesson%20for%20airbrushing/Brushingthelighthousee.jpg

[moylan]

(Had to start another post cos of the 3 img limit Grrrr...

The fence on the left is straight is simple, so now onto the Truck, this is where i had to get pretty creative, most of it was able to be done from parts above it. once again just look all around it for similarities, some parts you need to build on it, for example the pillar immediately left of the tower, i needed to target from the top of the usable part of the pillar and on the edge and was only able to make one click to start with , then i targeted where i had just started, and went a bit further, then did it again and so on, till i had the whole edge of it done. (Tried to demonstrate with colour burn next to it in the next pic, dont know if you understand or not, The darker the colour burn, the more times i had targeted that area, but to the left on the pillar obviously)

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/lesson%20for%20airbrushing/Brushingthetruck.jpg

The truck was the hardest, because i had no idea what it was meant to look like behind it... So you may notice a red pole kind of looking thing above/behind the tray on the truck, Basically in the one i posted before, i just copied that 4 times, to try and make it look like an open sort of thing.. like a kind of "gazebo?" . But don't want to do that again, as it just doesn't look quite right. I added a bit of grass to lessen the burden of trying to figure something out for the whole area there. I used the main shaded part of the wall just behind it and the shadow from the pillar to give the appearance of an edge on the other side. ( sorry if i start to get confusing here now at the end, as it is pretty late at night... i will go over it sometime in the next few days and edit parts that are too weird to understand) I will demonstrate like always with arrows...

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/lesson%20for%20airbrushing/demonstrationgazeebo.jpg

And after a little contrast adjustment, the finished thing looks something like
this

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r70/moylanishot/lesson%20for%20airbrushing/finished.jpg

Obviously, all of the principles here are usable no matter what kind of object you want to remove, just think what would be behind the object, look for similarities in the picture, and the cloning tool is your best mate, Have Fun!

[Atlas]

Great stuff,

Thanks for that.

[alexander]

Great stuff,

Thanks for that.

Agree. I like to see the before and after. Sharing the skills to do it is what helps.

Alex

[Scott Murray]

Thanks for the hints, it is alway great to learn.:)

[moylan]

Yeh no problem, i might try and come up with some other things to talk about too