Originally posted at www.equinefotography.com/blog

A tip for removing unwanted items from backgrounds: keep it real!

There's a time and place for cutting your horse out of his picture and pasting him on a rainbow or the clouds or a mountain meadow...but most of the time, quick simple fixes in PS can simply improve a basic picture.  I'm not looking to spend all afternoon in front of the computer, I just want to fix a tail, an ear, remove a handler, or something similar.  For this, I say, keep it real!

What do I mean by this?  I mean - don't remove the entire background AND try to replace the background with pieces from within the same picture if possible.  (Now don't overdo it and go crazy with the clone tool, have some sense!)For example, in the foto below, I chose to remove the woman by covering her up with the woods behind it.  I didn't do too much and left everything alone as much as possible.  I could easily remove ALL that forest and put her on a big meadow, or just blur out the forest, or any host of other things, but I want to preserve the original look and lighting here.  The most creative thing I did was try to make sure I didn't make two tree trunks that went nowhere or something like that.

For these pictures, the baby just needed an ear transplant.  But by grabbing a rather large amount of leaves (from another picture taken just seconds earlier) to go with the new ears and using the masks in PS, I was able to blend the entire leafy area very naturally.  There's no reason to painfully make an exact ear transplant when both items are on the SAME nonspecific background! (Also note that where the lead was removed, I made sure the branches still looked believable...beware branches and tree trunks!)

 

In short, less is sometimes more.  The more you use PS, the faker your picture might look.  When your main objective is just to show off the horse by removing a few distracting items, try to keep as much of the original picture intact as possible for the best effect.

Examples of Foto Editing can be seen at www.equinefotography.com/foto_editing.html