One of the things that is commonly done in digital manipulation of photographs is to remove people. I took the original picture (below) of Tyler and his family. Several months later I needed a photograph of Tyler for a magazine article. It was simpler to remove the rest of his family from the photograph than to set up a time to take his picture. I used Photoshop 4.0 LE, an inexpensive but reasonably powerful image editor.
Tyler, Kendra, Carolyn, and Tim
Beginning with this picture, I drew a rectangle around Tyler's head and shoulders and used the CROP command to eliminate everything else. This left Tyler along with part of his mother and sister. I then used the CLONE tool to eliminate them from the photograph. The clone tool takes pixels from one place in the photograph (which you select) and puts them in another (which you select). It is a very powerful tool.
Tyler 1
The picture on the left shows the cropped portion taken from the top of the page. I took wood pixels from the background and dropped them over his sister and mother. I also took pixels from his tux to rebuild the missing parts of his shoulder. I cloned out the horizontal seam in the wood just above his right ear. The result is the photo on the right. Then I began cloning out the distracting vertical strip of wood that goes just behind Tyler's head.
Tyler 2
This is the final image that I sent to the magazine for publication.
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