Exercise: Alteration

The final exercises for this part of the course is deliberate, out-and-out alteration of the content of the image, and requires Photoshop for its Clone Stamp tool and its cut-and-paste abilities. There are many possibilities, limited only by imagination and skill, but to keep this exercise simple in concept, the concentration is on removing a major element of an image.

I need to take a photograph which contains one distinct subject occupying an area of between about one-eighty and one-sixth of the total image (approx.). It could be a person in a garden, for example, perhaps one of two or three people. The aim is to successfully remove this one element, replacing it with elements from the background and foreground. 'Successfully' means that a viewer coming fresh to the picture would not be able to tell that there had been any retouching. Relevant techniques are:

• the Clone Stamp tool used to replace areas with adjacent areas
• making a selection of a background area, copying, pasting and moving over the area to be retouched
• the Patch tool to replace areas with adjacent areas

 This image of a water fountain was taken with the focus on the cascading water, which took a few attempts, I was pleased with the image and hoped to make use of it sometime.

 This image was taken inside the Pantheon, Rome. I placed a small area of the window in the top left corner, although this affected the dynamic range of the image, without it, the image was too confusing, the image needs a piece of the window to make it obvious that it is the Pantheon ceiling.

I took the spout and cascading water from the first image and placed onto the image of the Pantheon. I reversed the orientation of the image in order for the water to 'pour' from the same side as the window. My idea behind this image was that of 'what happens in the Pantheon when it rains?' my main influence was images by Eric Johansson and his extreme style of art photography.