Photoshop Fun - Erasing someone from a Photo

Veronical asked a question that got me to thinking about how much fun it can be to manipulate photos. I took a picture form this summer featuring my friend Karen and her partner Cynthia. Since Karen was in the middle of the picture, I decided to take her out. Not that Id on't love Karen, as she rocks with the BIG DOGS but I thought it would make an interesting photo essay.  There is one caveat about these images--they are saved as VERY low resolution jpgs.  This is also quick and dirty--you would want to take more time and care to do any editing for anything that was to be saved as high quality print resolution. The techniques would still work, but you would want to take more time and care. 

 First, make several copies of your background layer, and then make all but one of them invisible. That way, you won't find yourself working on the wrong layer, which is VERY easy to do. NEVER worok on the original layer. ALWAYS make more copies than you need.  Layers are cheap, and if you totally screw one up pase the point of CTRL-ALT_Z (undo) you can throw that one away ans start again. HEAR the voice of sad experience!  ;-D. 

Here I have used Quick Mask (located under the color boxes in the Tool Bar) to mask out Karen. Then I made the selection and cut her out, leaving a hole.  The hole is white because jpgs do not allow transparency. 

To cover the hole, I used a large brush and cloned across, very crudely, as you can see. then I went' back with a smaller brush to make a smoother background, taking out all the foreground roses.  I'll add them back in with a couple more layers later on. 

 Just in case you wanted to know, I did not really plan how this would work. I just jumped in to play because I know that I don't have any real need for this picture and it is just for an example.  I's okayto just play and learn.  IN fact,m that's the only way I can learn unless I have abook where someone else already figured it out for me! 

 I used a new layer and maksed out everything except the foreground roses. I had to do it twice because when I did it the first time, I did not notice that I had erased the right side and bottom corner.That's called learning!!! 

This doesn't look all that bad, at least not at this thumbnail size, but the background still shows some cloning. So, I made a copy of the foreground roses, cleaned up a lot of the background from them, and did some transforming: flip horizontal, stretch, rotate, and a slght skew. I moved this layer between the foreground and the background. Layers ROCK.  I decided that it looked okay. 

 I put Karen's red shadow back in the image (actually a transparent layer since the masking does not show up when you save an image) just so you could see where she was. And there's the finale.  I used unsharp mask on the background layer to disguise the cloning more and make the  bits fit together. Unsharp mask has lots of good features. 

 I hope you have some ideas now that you can do--for example, you could add someone else to the image!