I took this group photo and somewhere along the way decided that i did not like the plywood under their feet. We have done the shot in the same location for about 6 years now so moving them was not really an option. Photoshop of course to the rescue.
I started this process by selecting the board. I used a bunch of selection tools, color range, magic wand, and so on until i had the best i could do with them and then switched to the quick mask mode. If you havent used this mode to finess your selections you have to try it. It is located near the bottom of the tools pallate on the left side of your screen. You click on it to get into it and click it again to exit it. It turns everything red that is not selected and you use your paint brush with white to take away the red (adding to your selection) and black to add red (adding to your selection). The nice thing about selecting this way is that you can use a soft edged brush to get a nice soft edge selection.
Once i had the entire plywood selected i hit the refine edge key to feather my selection just a bit then i duplicated my background layer and hit the delete key to remove the board from that layer. I then turned the top layer off (eye on the left side of the layers pallate and clicked on my background layer to work on it.
I went into filter - vanishing point and drew my grid for the walkway. I will not go into detail about using vanishing point here but if you are cloning anything that has perspective then you should do some reading on it. I used the clone tool with heal turned off in the vanishing point window and cloned the walk so it would cover the entire board that was visable. Now when you turn the top layers visibility back on the board, which we deleted, is now walkway.
Lastly i make a selection of the building sign where it was in shadow and did a curves adjustment to it to brighten it up a bit.
Here is the finished product.
Note: tomorrow i will be doing a tutorial on photomatix pro so stay tuned.
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