Ex. 23 Alteration

The final exercise in this project is by the far the hardest, and the least satisfactory from an ethical standpoint. However, it was an interesting activity and a serious test of patience and perseverance.  My selected image is a shot that was under consideration for my assignment 4, but was rejected as I felt there were too many people in the frame:

First task was the easiest using the clone stamp tool to remove the beer bottle in the upper left of the frame.  For this exercise I have only used the clone stamp tool, varying the brush size and hardness to each of the removal challenges:

Next I removed the man leaning up against the wall, pretty simple this one

Next was the couple at the front, a little harder, but no major problem:

The large group of girls on the right hand side was much harder as I had to clone from both sides, due to the size of the group.  An issue that came up here was that the steps are not completely parallel to each other, so I had to be careful with each selection:

Next to go and by far the hardest to deal with was the two guys at the top.  The area they are sititng in has no clear replica in the frame, so I had to effectively paint in new structure, but still using the clone tool.  Looking carefully there are obvious artifacts, but you would need to know to look and even then at a pixel level.

The last group was easier and by now I was building skill and confidence

Final task was removal of a few shadows and intrusions into the frame on the right hand side.

Would have taken less time to go back and re-shoot the image, but again, a valuable learning experience.

This example represents no ethical issues, but similar techniques used on an image presented as news would be pretty much fraud.