Remember those unwanted beachgoers that we deleted from a photo back in Hour 13, “Removing Red Eye, Dust, and Scratches”? Working in the Editor’s Full Edit mode, we copied a stretch of sand and pasted it right over the people we wanted to get rid of, using the sand like a patch. That’s the simplest possible way to delete something from a photo, and it works well whenever the object is set against a fairly uniform background, such as sand or grass or a blank wall. This trick works with both small and large objects, and I’ve got a new twist to make it even easier than it was in Hour 13.

As you probably remember, we started by making a feathered selection of the appropriate size and shape to cover the unwanted object. We then moved the selection to a nice blank area that would provide a good patch, copied, and pasted, creating a new layer containing just the patch. The final step was to position the patch over the object, making it disappear. When you’re using this technique, you can work with any selection tool. Often the Lasso or the Polygonal Lasso is the easiest way to draw a selection around an object, but the Quick Selection tool also works well. You can even use a marquee selection if the object you’re covering is squarish or round.

The step in between creating the selection and copying it is vital: feathering the selection. This softens the edges so that the patch blends with its surroundings. Figure 18.1 shows what can happen if you don’t feather your selection.

Figure 18.1. This patch’s hard edges make it obvious to the most casual observer—not at all the effect we’re going for.

And now for the twist: Press Alt. Yes, it’s that simple. Instead of copying and pasting the patch, creating a new layer along the way, press Alt and drag a copy of the selected area right into position as your patch. When you’ve got the patch right where you want it, press Ctrl+D to drop the selection. At this point, the patch becomes part of the Background layer. This means, of course, that you can’t go back and move it later, so be sure of your positioning before you drop the selection.

Let’s take a look at the patch technique in action. In Figure 18.2, I’d really like to get rid of that extra horn from the cow to the left of the one that was photographed. Or maybe it’s a bull—I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t want to crop the photo because I like the proportions as is. Cloning over the horn will be a pain because of the wood’s texture, the knots, and the grooves between boards. So I’ll try the patch technique instead.

Figure 18.2. Somehow that extra bit of horn sticking into the picture from the left is really distracting from the lovely bovine specimen the picture is meant to show.

Using a section of wall from just above the horn, I’ve successfully covered the horn—one distraction down (see Figure 18.3). The selection’s feathering enables the patch to blend right in with the rest of the wall, and it was easy to position the patch because I just had to drag it straight down. Things might get a little trickier if I try to get rid of the painted number under my bull’s (or cow’s?) chin. But I’m going to attempt it anyway.

Figure 18.3. The extra horn is gone, after the careful application of a patch.

The first step is to make the selection. Here, as usual, I use my trick of drawing around the object I want to replace so that I can be sure the selection will be the right size and shape, and I make sure the selection is feathered. Picking a location from which to grab the patch is more complicated this time because I need the grooves between the boards in the patch to line up with those in the wall behind it. As I position the patch, I can press Ctrl+H to hide the edges of the marquee so that I can make sure it’s lining up correctly. When I’m satisfied, I can drop the selection. A quick application of the Burn tool darkens the patch, and then it blends perfectly (see Figure 18.4).

Figure 18.4. With two patches in place, this picture is looking much cleaner.

Now, suppose that what I really want from this photo is not actually the portrait of a cow, but, in fact, the rustic barn wall behind Bossie. It would make a great background for the flyer I’m designing to promote a charity hayride. But I need the whole thing—and that means our bovine friend has to go. An operation of this size takes several different patches, and some of them might need a little modification before I’m ready to drop them. Sometimes you’ll find that a patch would look great—if only.... If only it were facing the other way, or were a bit wider, or were set at a slightly different angle. In these situations, all you have to do is transform your selection.

Let’s see what happens when I try to remove the animal life from this photo. My first patch comes from above the cow’s head, and it’s too short to cover the entire area I want to patch (see Figure 18.5). The answer: Drag the bottom handle of the transform marquee down, stretching the patch to fit.

Figure 18.5. Any time you’re moving a selection, you’re automatically in Free Transform mode and can resize and rotate the selection.

The rest of the process is pretty much the same. As I move each patch into position, I need to do one or more of the following to it:

When I’m done patching the boards above and below the horizontal beam, it’s time to copy bits and pieces of the beam to get rid of the last vestiges of cattle. The final picture looks as though the stall had been empty the whole time (see Figure 18.6).

Figure 18.6. No more cow!

Group photos are a wonderful thing, but they’ve got an Achilles’ heel that never fails to kick in just when it’s least wanted: Murphy’s Law. It’s an unwritten rule of photography that any time you try to shoot a whole bunch of people at the same time, even if most of them are facing front, smiling, and looking great, there’ll always be one who isn’t. Maybe she’s looking off in the wrong direction, maybe his eyes are closed—whatever it is, there’s always something. If you have other very similar shots, you can often eliminate the problem using pieces of the other photos; we’ll look at ways to do that later in this hour. But sometimes the only possible fix is just to get rid of the person entirely. And if the person in question is your least favorite brother-in-law, well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Take a look at Figure 18.7, for example. It’s not a typical group shot, but it definitely has a person I need to get rid of. This is a really charming shot of a dog I happen to know getting a well-deserved hug from a friend at a race meet. The only thing that’s wrong with it is the extraneous person sitting next to the finish line. As a finish line judge, she was important at the time, but we really don’t need her in the picture now.

Figure 18.7. How can anyone resist those eyes?

The obvious place to start is with the Clone Stamp, covering up the line judge with grass. Meanwhile, though, I want to be careful to keep the white stake and the orange sideline tape in front of her. To make that work, I clone grass right up to the edge of the stake and tape; then I clone a section of stake or tape over the area where I just added grass, to make sure the edges stay crisp. Halfway through the job, things are looking pretty good (see Figure 18.8).

Figure 18.8. Notice anything odd about this version of my photo? Right—that floating umbrella really needs to go.

Meanwhile, however, I haven’t been as careful to retain the beach umbrella’s stake. I’m okay with that, however, because I’ve decided that having a giant orange umbrella sticking out of the back of my friend’s head probably isn’t the best look for her. So I’ll just get rid of the whole thing. As I work with the Clone Stamp, I choose my source points carefully, to match the area I’m cloning next to. The grass just behind the sideline tape is much lighter than the grass farther out, so it’s important that I use the right shade for each section of the picture. The end result preserves the folding chair and the sideline markers, but eliminates the line judge and her umbrella, making a much less cluttered picture (see Figure 18.9).

Figure 18.9. The grassy countryside is once more pristine.

Of course, getting rid of your problem person is often only half the battle. If removing the person leaves a big hole in the middle of the group, you have to fill in the hole. You can accomplish this in a number of ways, depending on the photo you’re working on.

Each of these techniques is based on things you’ve learned in earlier hours: cropping, copying and pasting a patch, and using the Clone Stamp and the Healing Brush. Don’t be afraid to combine techniques and experiment to come up with your own.

One of Photoshop Elements’ newest (and neatest) tools is actually a revamped version of an old tool: Photomerge. Using the original Photomerge, now renamed Photomerge Panorama, you can stitch together multiple photos into one wide image. And now, using Photomerge Group Shot, you can replace a face or even a whole person with another version of that person from a different photo.

In Figure 18.10, you see two pictures of a first-time dad and his baby son. In one photo, Dad looks great, but the baby is squirming and making a face. In the other photo, the kid looks perfect, but Dad has changed the angle of his head, so there’s a nasty reflection on his glasses. This is exactly the kind of situation for which Photomerge Group Shot is designed—two (or more) photos that, put together, will produce more than the sum of their parts.

Figure 18.10. If I can combine these two photos, I’ll have the best of both worlds.

To get started, choose your photos and switch to the Editor. Open the Project Bin and Ctrl+click to choose the photos you want to use for this project. Then click the Guided Edit tab and click Group Shot under the Photomerge heading. Following the instructions in the Task pane, drag the best picture from the Project Bin to the right side of the Group Shot window (see Figure 18.11). This is the foundation on which you’ll build your perfect picture.

Figure 18.11. The first thing I need to do is specify which photo is the Final version.

Click another photo in the Image Bin to move it to the Source area in the Group Shot window. Then click the Pencil tool button in the Task pane; you’re ready to start picking and choosing the bits you want to copy. Using the Pencil tool, circle or scribble over the part of the Source picture that you want to copy into the Final picture. Ta-da! Photoshop Elements puts that face, or that person, into the other photo, blending it in seamlessly. To see exactly what part of the Source picture was copied into the Final picture, click the Show Regions check box in the Task pane (see Figure 18.12).

Figure 18.12. Photoshop Elements copied more of the picture than I indicated so that it could blend the new head perfectly with the background.

If you’re working with photos in which the lighting of the position of the subjects differs, you’ll probably want to take advantage of Photomerge Group Shot’s Advanced options. With the Alignment tool, you can tell Photoshop Elements which points in the photos should match up, position-wise (see Figure 18.13). (Keep reading; we go into more details about using the Alignment tool in the next section.) For pictures that aren’t quite the same brightness, check the Pixel Blending check box to adjust the brightness of the copied areas so they match the Final picture more closely.

Figure 18.13. As I click in each picture, its three alignment points appear as crosshairs on the photo.

As with Photomerge Group Shot, Photomerge Faces is a variation on the original Photomerge, which was designed to blend the edges of photos to produce a seamless panorama. You use Group Shot on a photo to swap in faces or even whole people from another picture. Faces, on the other hand, gets down to the real nitty-gritty by enabling you to replace individual facial features. Now, of course, you can use this capability to figure out what the love child of Elvis and Bigfoot would look like—or you can get serious and use it to produce optimal portraits.

In my case, I wanted to produce a portrait of a greyhound named Sailor. The day I tried to shoot the portrait was chilly and gray, and Sailor’s owner was a really good sport about holding him while I took shot after shot, trying for the perfect picture (see Figure 18.14). I never got that perfect picture—but I’ll have it now. Using Photomerge Faces, I can take the best overall picture from the photo shoot and swap in facial features from other shots to produce the particular look that Sailor just wouldn’t give me that day.

Figure 18.14. As you can see, I ended up with 28 pictures, none of which was what I wanted.

After sifting through the photos, I settled on one that was almost what I wanted. I’d been looking for an open-mouthed shot (Sailor has great teeth), but the best one had closed eyes. So I found another photo of a similar pose with open eyes; the only problem was that Sailor was facing the other way in this picture. No problem—before starting the Photomerge session, I opened both photos, activated the one in which Sailor was facing the wrong way, and chose Image, Rotate, Flip Horizontal. Now he was facing to the left in both pictures.

Selecting both photos in the Project Bin, I clicked the Guided Edit tab and then clicked Faces under the Photomerge heading. I dragged the open-mouthed shot into the Final area and clicked the other picture’s thumbnail in the Project Bin to place it in the Source area. My next step was to align the images. I couldn’t count on Photoshop Elements to take care of this for me because the photos have different backgrounds and Sailor is in different parts of the frame in each photo. To align the two pictures, I clicked the Alignment tool in the Task pane. Then I clicked in each photo in turn and dragged the three numbered alignment indicators to matching locations (see Figure 18.15). When I had them located where I wanted them, I clicked Align Photos to have Photoshop Elements transform the Source photo to match the angle and position of the Final photo.

Figure 18.15. The new shape of the Source photo indicates how the picture was transformed so that the shape of Sailor’s head would match that in the Final photo.

At this point, the only step remaining was to designate an area to copy from the Source picture into the Final picture. Switching to the Pencil tool in the Task pane, I made a quick squiggle around Sailor’s eye in the Source picture and watched as Photoshop Elements transplanted that eye into the Final picture (see Figure 18.16).

Figure 18.16. Now I have a photo of an open-mouthed and open-eyed dog—just what I always wanted.

We spent a lot of time throwing around people and body parts in this hour, but the results when you apply these techniques to your own photos should be worth it. You learned a more refined version of the patch technique for deleting objects from photos, which you originally saw back in Hour 13. You also saw how it’s possible to remove a person or an object from a photo without a trace, using copy and paste, the Clone Stamp, and the Healing Brush. And you learned about Photoshop Elements’ two new Photomerge commands: Group Shot and Faces. In the next hour, we move on to something completely different: filters.

We covered a lot of material this hour, and you haven’t yet had a chance to practice any of it. So complete these quiz questions, check your answers, and then spend sometime practicing with the activities.