Exercise: Alteration.

Outline: Take an image which contains one distinct subject occupying an area. Using the clone stamp tool in photoshop and it's cut and paste abilities, remove the major element in your image.

Before attempting something big, I wanted to attempt a small removal to test the water.

original image

I love the above image but it is spoiled by the two people in the river in the background of the image. So my first trial is to remove these people. I tended to keep to the clone tool to do this and this is the outcome:

People cloned out

Hooray! I did it. And with that successful, it's now time to attempt something bigger.

Original image

This is the trickier one. This image was taken at a wedding I was shooting. Irrelevant image of people congregating outside the venue. My task is to remove the lady to the left of the image. I anticipate that this will prove more difiicult due to the lines of the building, and also the angle of the lines.

Image with the lady removed

Et Voila! Success. After much cloning, cropping and spot healing I can say that I am happy with this outcome. The lines did prove difficult to keep constant during the process as anticipated but I feel sometimes that I can be overcritical and too much of a perfectionist. And whereas I would need to be 'perfect' if this was to fool someone into believeing it is real, I feel that this is a significant alteration for the purpose of the exercise where someone could overlook this photo while browsing and not realise it had been altered.

Conclusion: This exercise could probably have been a lot easier with a different image but my task was to try something that was not so easy as just deleting something and cloning in trees and grass where that something was in the image. If you look closely at the image, you can see little indiscrepancies but again, only if you look over it closely. The first image was very successful and I'm happy with the outcome of the second  image as well.