Removing Objects in the background

[DannyT]

Hi everyone, hope you can help.

I took some photos for a wedding the other week and whilst most of them are good, there are a couple that i want to remove some objects out of the background (gravestones!!), or blur them as though I have used a very shallow depth of field.

Any idea how I would go about doing this in either Aperture, Lightroom or Photoshop Element 10?

Im a total novice at photo editing so a step by step guide would be great or indeed pointing me to the right place would be equally as good!

Thanks

 

[Kerioak]

Blurring often looks very artificial - can you clone them out or create a new layer with the items/people you wish to retain and them lighten or put in a low opacity white layer below to give more of a sense of depth?

 

[swanseamale47]

Are we talking one or two stones or a lot? As Christine says bluring the background can look very artificial if it's not done right.

 

[DorsetDude]

Stick one of your photos up as an example then the awesome dudes(no not me!) in this section will be able to advise even better.

 

[DannyT]

[/url]
IMG_3548 by DannyToft, on Flickr[/IMG]

 

[DannyT]

BTW i know its a poorly composed shot - these were grabbed literally as everyone was walking into the church and not many people wanted to pose as it was so cold.

 

[sduk]

i will have a go by no means a PS genius but like a challenge

 

[sduk]

how is this?

tried to add a bit of lawn and then make some more of the bushes in the background and then made the edge of the lawn and them meet

I cut around the lady in the wheel chair and then the lad to the right of her, inverted my selection and then created a new layer. Then i used the clone stamp mainly and tried to use the foliage from the other part of the shot. For the branches I selected part of the tree above the lady with the pink hat then duplicated it and distorted it into a longer tree so it didnt look identical.

hope that helps a bit, like I said, not an expert, just self taught and play about until I like it lol.

others will probably do better

 

[DannyT]

To me that looks great!

Now, very slowly, how did you do that again??

 

[sduk]

thanks, not sure how else to explain it other than above.

Have you used photoshop much? I am just self taught and started off "modifying" cars when I was younger. This taught me the basics of using layers and the different tools.

I found the Photoshop BIBLE -

http://www.digimods.co.uk/tutorials/tutorials.htm

Really helpful, talks you through using layers and doing different manipulations of photos.

It does it all for cars but if you can change the colour of a car then you can do it to everything, same as adding and changing parts.

Hope that helps?

 

[DannyT]

Thanks mate - will have a go myself. cheers again.