You’re going to learn several great techniques for editing unwanted items out of the alleyway. These techniques are so useful, that anyone who works with Photoshop should be familiar with them.

 

Before we get into this, here’s a before and after so that you can see the 4 different spots that we’ll be editing.

These 4 spots are broken up into steps 1-4, so feel free to skip around. You can do them in any order. Step 1 is a simple transformation, Step 2 teaches you how to use the Clone Stamp Tool, Step 3 uses vanishing point, and Step 4 is just for fun.

Before we start, download the starting image HERE.

Step 1a

Grab your Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make a selection directly across the alley from the pipe, so that it’s bigger than the size of the pipe.

Copy the selection’s contents (Ctrl+C), and Paste them (Ctrl+V). They should automatically go on a new layer. Next Select All (Ctrl+A), go to Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontal, and Deselect (Ctrl+D). Now go into Free Transform by going to Edit>Free Transform or hitting Ctrl+T. Rotate the layer’s contents and drag it until you get it somewhere where it lines up on either side. You shouldn’t have to change the height or width to do this. Remember to hit ‘Enter’ in order to apply the transformation.

Step 1b

While you still have the top layer selected, add a layer mask by clicking the ‘add layer mask’ button at the bottom of the layers palette (it looks like a circle inside of a rectangle). If you don’t know by now, layer masks allow you to erase certain parts of a layer in a sense, while being totally nondestructive. This means you can completely undo any masking that you do.

Once you click this, you need to grab your brush tool (B), and select a large round brush with a hardness of 0%. Press ‘D’ to restore your foreground color to black and then brush around the outside of the wall cover up section that we just did. This will let it blend into the rest of the wall. If you overdo it and you can start seeing the pipe peeping through, press ‘X’ to switch your foreground color to white, and then brush back on the spot where you see the pipe. By now you should hardly be able to tell that there ever was a pipe there.

Step 2

Create a new layer on top of all of your other layers. Next grab the Clone Stamp Tool (S), and at the top make sure that ‘Sample’ is set to ‘All Layers.’ Set your brush to around 50px with a hardness of 0%. While holding down the ‘Alt’ key, click on one of the dark shiny parts of the asphalt towards the bottom center of the image. This samples an area to clone from. Let go of the ‘Alt’ key and just brush over the area where the drain/manhole cover thing is. For the best effect,
resample at least two times while you do this so that it doesn’t look obvious that that area is a direct clone of another area.

Step 3a

This is the hardest step, but bear with me because this is a really awesome and useful tool in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I believe this feature is only in CS2 and CS3, so if you have something older, you’re out of luck. We’re going to be using Vanishing Point in this step, so create a new layer on top of all of your other layers and go to Filter>Vanishing Point.

Once you are inside vanishing point grab the Zoom tool (Z), and zoom into the top of the image three times. Now grab the Create Plane Tool (C). Set 4 points one by one so that they each touch a corner along the ceiling just like in the picture below.

Normally, the plane will turn blue once you start to get the right points, but if it stays red like mine it’s not a big deal as long as you know your points are right in the corners where they are supposed to be.

Step 3b

While still in Vanishing Point, grab the Marquee Tool (M), and make a selection around the segment right above the light. The marquee will automatically match the perspective of the plane.

While holding ‘Alt’ and ‘Shift’ at the same time, click inside this selection and drag it down until the top of the selection lines up with the top of the segment on the right. Let go of your mouse button and while holding ‘Alt’ and ‘Shift’ click and drag until you move it down an entire segment again.

Step 3c

At this point you should have your selection pasted onto two different places, with the light totally covered and the pipe on the bottom partially covered. Don’t leave Vanishing Point yet. Grab the Stamp Tool (S) and make sure the brush has a diameter of around 50px and a hardness of 0%. Just like in step 2, sample an area with alt and then brush over where you want to edit, except this time everything will be done in perspective. Specifically we need to edit the dark shadows at the bottom-right of each segment that we created. So if you’re going to edit a side like where those dark shadows are, you have to save from the side of to the left. Make sure the place you sample from is always larger or almost the same size as the area you are pasting to to avoid quality loss. You really just need to play around with this until you get something that you like. Remember press Alt+Shift+Z to step backward if you mess up. Hit ‘OK’ when you are satisfied.

Now what we have to do is mask away this bottom area (go back to step 1 if you need a refresher on how to do this) with a soft brush so that the pipe is completely visible again, you can also just erase this bottom section with a soft brush, but masking is preferable. You’ll probably need to start with a medium sized brush to brush away the area on top of the pipe and come back with a large brush in order to get a nice blend.

Step 4

This step is just for fun. I created a new layer on top of everything else and used the Clone Stamp Tool to sample from a white part in the sign and brush over the text on the sign. Then I added a text layer, with some text on it, and I tried to make the orignal font as close as possible. I used the eyedropper tool to extract a color (#432118). What I found to work really well was Arial Narrow set to Anti-Alias Strong and 18px. I also rotated the text a very little bit and in the character window I changed the tracking to 220 (in order to space out the letters) and the horizontal scale to 82% in order to decrease each letter’s width.

Well there you have it. You now should have several different techniques from editing photos, and hopefully you’ve seen how powerful Vanishing Point is for working with things in perspective. Here’s my final image as well as the PSD as always.

Click To Enlarge

Download the PSD