Exercise 23: Alteration

For the final project in this section of the course the intention is out and out alteration of the image content. Using clone stamp tool and other possibilities a major element had to be removed. In re-working some of my earlier images I have already done some removal but as the majority of them were straightforward cloning of black background I would not consider using them for this exercise. For example the removal of the paper in my "Health" image.



Original




Rework 1




Rework 2



















To complete this exercise I chose one of the images I took of an elephant during the Elephant Parade 2010. Situated in one of London's parks at the time I deliberately included the street furniture and tourists. For this task I removed these elements.




Original Image


The first section that I cloned was the area between the elephants legs. To create the other side of the tree a selection was made of the left hand side with the rectangular marquee tool edit>transform>flip horizontal and it was blended in using a layer mask and brush tool.

Cloning and duplicating with Marquee Tool

Next the small elephant in the background was removed by cloning, the street lamp and finally the tourist. Again I found it easier to create the new side of the tree by making a selection and flipping it.



Selection flipped Horizontal



The clone tool/layer mask was again utilised to remove the rest of his body and fine tune the marquee selection.





Final Altered Image


Alteration by cloning is a very useful tool/skill and can be used to good effect to remove distracting elements however once again this should only be used when improving a composition where the message/intention of the photograph is not to deceive.

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