SAcamera Blog - Digital Photography, Reviews, Tech-Talk, Events and Customer Gallery

So you have taken the most beautiful photograph of the beach and the setting is perfect! …except for that random person wandering into your frame at the most inappropriate moment! What to do!

Here you can see where the tools are on the tool bar and how the image looks before we start any editing

It’s not as hard as you might think to rectify the problem. You just have to wave a magic photoshop wand on that person and make them disappear.

Here’s how you remove unwanted bits of ‘whatever’ in your photograph.(one of the ways anyway!)

Open your image in photoshop. Select your Patch Tool (you could also use your healing brush and clone tool, but we are working with the patch tool today)

Zoom into the section that you want to fix up. In my image you will see a number of people walking along the beach and I want to create a sense of alone-ness in the image, so I will be removing all of them.

With the patch tool in hand and your image zoomed in - hold down your left mouse button and draw a very careful selection box around the bit that you want removed, don’t touch the edges of the people as it will cause shadows when you try and replace it. Once the box is drawn, right click anywhere in the selected portion of your image and make sure your tool is set to “use patch as source”

Now hold your mouse over the selected portion and holding down the left mouse button - drag the ’selection box to somewhere on the screen with similar pattern to cover the original selection with. When you let go of your left mouse button, the patch that you have dragged your selection to will replace the orignal selection.

Should you find that it looks unnatural or you replace it with an area that doesn’t match, hold down Ctrl + Z (undo last action) and you can start again. When you have it right - press Ctrl + D (deselect) and admire your handy work.

You can perform this action a number of times on one image. You can see in the step by step pictures here that I cleared away a number of people on the beach and a seagull from the sky.

NOTE: this method is also great for removing unwanted blemishes in portrait shots. You could be saving a dashing bride from wedding photos she wants to hide away by removing her unlucky ’stress’ blemish!

Before any work is done...

No more people cluttering up my beach...

a little more editing and then converting the image to black and white I have created the feeling I first saw when I looked through the view finder to take this photograph