Part 4 Digital photography and truth: Exercise 23 Alteration

The final exercise is a deliberate out and out alternation of the content of an image. There are many possibilities, limited only by imagination and skill but to keep the exercise simple in concept we will concentrate on removing a major element of an image.

Take a photograph which contains one distinct subject. The aim is to successfully remove this one element. ‘Successfully’ means that a viewer coming fresh to the picture would not be able to tell that there had been any retouching.

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Grannie’s Teeth Image

I took this image of a set of steps on the Cobb Harbour wall which was made famous in the Jane Austen novel ‘Persuasion’. It was a very dull day with very heavy cloud cover which made the light very flat (see original image below).

There are several elements of this picture that could be changed (or improved):

·         the flat grey sky
·         the dark harbour wall on the right hand side
·         And the child looking the other i.e., way as she walked round the corner of the harbour.

I started to improve the picture by checking the Levels and lightening the whole image as it was rather dark and dingy.

Levels checked

I lifted the mid-tones as there was very little definition in that area. This made the right hand wall light and showed more of the detail of the stones.

Once I had set the Levels I went to Image/ adjust/ shadows and highlights but only changed the shadows as I was unable to get much difference by increasing the highlight slider, even to 100%.

Shadows lightened

I selected the sky area only and then used the highlight part of the shadows/ highlight palette. This brought in some detail but increased the grain in the sky which was unacceptable. In the end I decided to delete the whole sky area and replace it with a more suitable one. I used the magic wand, set at 20, to select all the flat grey area and deleted it using the Delete key on the keyboard.

New sky chosen

New sky added

I needed to reorder the layers so that the sky sat behind the harbour area.

My next task was to remove the child who was facing away from the camera. I used the Clone tool to cover over the child and replace her with a copy of the harbour walkway surface. Below you can see that I have removed part of the child.

Once the second child had been removed I checked the whole picture and felt that the other girl needed to be brightened. I selected the girl using the Quick Mask and used the brush tool to refine it.