Photoshop -clone tool

Dagwood56

No longer a newbie, moving up!
Joined
Jul 19, 2007
Messages
3,025
Reaction score
491
Can others edit my Photos
Photos NOT OK to edit
I'm not sure I'm posting this in the right place, but here goes.

setup:

I like to take photos of old farm houses, covered bridges and barns. I live in rural Berks county PA where the roads are very hilly, have no shoulder, are narrow, and twist and turn. Taking barn photos is basically a stop and shoot out the car window deal unless I were to attempt to park on private property. Even at that, I'd have to crawl through electrified fences into pastures to get a better vantage point.

In most cases with the barns and farmhouses there is a problem with electrical wires. At times there are as many as four wires into the house as well as the barn and surrounding out buildings. I have a gorgeous shot I took on Christmas day of an old stone farmhouse and barn down in a valley, but there are four wires that run across the top of the photo [in front of the home's roof] because the only vantage point was at a sharp bend in the road right at the top of a hill.

[I have version 1 of photo shop elements]

I have used the clone tool to remove the wires from photos in the past, but in some cases it just doesn't work well. There is a lot of detail to some of the barns - old stone or wood and louvered shutters and many have hex signs. Frankly to me, it looks more natural to leave the wires than try and fix a hex sign or wood planks after the removal of a wire.

Am I doing something wrong when cloning, or is it common place and acceptable to lose intricate detailing? And is it worth it to lose that deatil just to remove some wires to "make" the perfect photo?

Feeling like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place because the structures are so nice as are the views, but then there are the wires!

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
Not seeing the pic, I would suggest zooming in and using a very small clone brush. You can almost get down to pixel size with it.
 
The clone tool is not your best function for removing unsightly objects.

Look for a tutorial on the patch tool via google. Here is one but there may be better ones out there.

http://www.eyesondesign.net/pshop/healing/brush.htm

I assume that version one as the same tools but I am not sure, you may need to upgrade. If you want better results.
 
Since this is in the beginners forum, I'd also suggest changing the source of your clone frequently. You can also use masks and clone onto a new layer sampling the current layer and below, that way, if you screw up too bad, you can mask it out or start over with no damage to the original.
Dug
 
Thanks a lot everyone.
 

Most reactions

Back
Top