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A person, car, garbage can, building, plant, tree, or just about anything can become an objectionable part of a picture if you didn't want it to be there in the first place. Rather than tearing all your wedding photos in half, consider replacing the unwanted spouse with more of the background or a large potted plant. Someone forget to move the car before taking a picture of your house for the real estate brochures? Get rid of the car, replacing it with curb and grass, as though the car had been in the garage all along.
It might seem like some sort of complicated sleight-of-hand, but you can replace one piece of content with another really rather simply. You need software that has Clone and/or Patch tools (or reasonable facsimiles), and you need to understand how the Clipboard works (so you can copy and paste content in big chunks).
Family members are often hard to deal with. No matter how much we love them, we sometimes wish they'd make themselves scarce, if only for a little while. But what if your ex-family member — someone you thought you'd never have to see again — is still haunting your family photos? Starting with a group photo, follow these steps:
1. Identify the unwanted person and use a selection tool — preferably a freeform or magnetic selection tool — to select him or her.
 | You don't have to worry about getting a little of the surrounding image in your selection as long as it doesn't include someone else's arm or the side of a face. |
2. Press the Delete key to get rid of the selected person.
The background layer or any other underlying layer's content now shows through the hole.
3. Fill the hole with other content — maybe more of the photo's background content (the sky or a nearby wall or stand of trees).
You can extend whatever's behind the rest of the picture to fill in where the now-missing person once stood. You have the following choices for filling in:
• Copy content from elsewhere and paste it onto the hole.
• Use the Clone tool to fill in the hole with sampled content from elsewhere in the image.
Whatever method you choose depends on three things:
- The size of the hole that the deleted person left behind
- Whether you have a lot of alternate content to use as fill
- Whether the picture has lighting issues
Perhaps everything but the deleted person is in shadow, and you can't seamlessly apply that dark content in his or her place. If lighting is the problem — and you have Photoshop — you may want to use the Patch tool (a tool that adjusts for texture and lighting) so that you preserve the lighting of the destination when you patch the hole.
If the hole is huge or you don't have any background to use, you may need to copy content and paste it into the hole, perhaps even going to another image to get the filler. Figure 1 shows a Before and an After of the same image. In the after version, the unwanted element (the dog) has been replaced by more of the surrounding grass and shrubbery.
Figure 1: Hide the dog behind the shrubbery.
 | What if the unwanted person isn't against a background or is sitting in front of someone else, and deleting him or her will leave you with half of a person? Consider bringing someone in from another picture and putting him or her in place of the person that you want to delete. You can always resize a new person from a smaller or larger image, and you can use your image editor's Burn or Dodge tools to adjust lighting if the substitute person comes from a darker or lighter image. Use the Blur or Smudge tools to make the stand-in blend in so that none of the edges look obvious. |
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