[MonteCarloSS86]

The other day I was out on the outskirts of town. There's a bunch of unused roads where they planned for housing that hasn't developed yet so there's pretty much huge open fields (huge by Florida standards) of brown grass. So I decided it might make a cool backdrop for a picture of the SS with the thunderheads growing in the west. One problem: the ugly skyline.

As you can see, not only is the horizon crooked, it's also littered with unappealing high-tension powerlines, drive-in car washes, and other little buildings. What I did was go into Photoshop CS3, put the SS and its shadow in one layer, put the foreground and background (hold the ugly buildings and sky) in their own layers, cutting out the ugly buildings in the process. Then, with my minimal Photoshop experience, I arranged the layers so that the car was always on top, followed by the sky, followed by the road and grass.

I then had to use the clone-stamp and smudge tools to get rid of pesky powerlines and the remaining rooftops (took about 30 minutes as I'm really inexperienced and there was a lot to remove) and then did adjustments to each layer as needed (curves, etc. etc.). This is my end result:

It'd be cool to get a thread going where we could share ideas with each other and come up with new ones! So what have you guys done in post-processing to make that shot better?

 

[leelander]

man that looks really good, i'm pretty computer illiterate so that in my books is a job well done

 

[stormwatcher]

Nice job rmodys. I love Photoshop too. I took a wooden light pole out of a winter scene once using the clone tool and on one photo, I sliced it into 3 sections, discarded the middle section, and joined the two remaining sections. It took some retouching to finish off but worked out fine in the end.

 

[2b2]

Nice pic, Rmodys!!!
great sky! & don't notice the enhancements at all
only suggestion would be to brighten the lower body of your car - as tho you had a reflector board to fill-in the shadows when taking the photo - to make it stand out more - see mask idea below

...did a simple background cleanup not long ago as part of a 'tweak' (chop with small changes for max effect):
chop -- original (not my pic)
just painted & copy'n'pasted things out

but what I hope is helpful (my ancient freebie software can't do layers), is the idea of making a 'mask'
- first paint out an area you want to modify in a solid contrasting color
- then select it (magic wand in my prg) & copy it
- paste that into a freshly opened version of the pic making sure it's aligned properly
- say Undo, which leaves the exact area selected for modifying

I've used this for changing upholstery color (a lot)
chop
original was kinda gray - mask

also used this for restoring background around a chopped-on bodypart - using a rectangular copy'n'paste so I could stretch the part to fit, the mask let me restore the 'corners'

hope this made sense -I'm no expert & strictly self-taught