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All right, so we have made some pretty impressive progress so far. If I were to
turn off these two layers by dragging over their eyeballs, you can see this is
what the rolling hills looked like before and I will drag again, watch the
screen, this is what they look like after. So we have a much better color match. You
see that? Now it's not perfect of course and we have
some major problems I think in terms of these buildings showing up in the background
and I want to go ahead and cover those up better. You can see if I turn
off the rolling hills eyeball, this right here this building is a bank actually,
you can see it's the Bank of Colorado. I don't know if you could make that
out and if I turn on the rolling hills much of the bank is covered up but not
nearly enough. So what we are going to do is we are going
to clone the trees onto the bank building. But we are not going to change any
of the colors in the background layer. We are going to affect the rolling
hills layer right here. So I will make sure it's active then I will press Shift+Tab
to get rid of the palette, so we have a little more room to work.
Now I am going to go ahead and zoom out a little bit and I am going to grab
this tool right here, the Clone Stamp tool, which is great for cloning details
inside of an image and I am going to increase the size of my brush to 100
pixels like so, and go ahead and hide that drop down palette from view. Now
what this brush does, is it allows you to clone regions of the image.
So you have to set up a source point, which is what's you are cloning and a
destination point, which is where you are cloning to and you do that with an
Alt-click. So if I press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click, I
establish that point right there is being the source and then when I release
the Alt or Option key I can see a preview of that area inside of my brush,
which is a new feature by the way of Photoshop CS4 and a really good one too.
Now I can paint over this bank building and it magically goes away. Of course,
that's a terrible clone right there because it's soft and drifty and it doesn't
look realistic at all. Certainly I got rid of the bank building but I didn't
replace it with anything credible and honestly this is a kind of thing where
somebody who is fairly experienced with Photoshop can completely nail you. They
will just look at this and go, well, you just cloned some trees. That's terrible.
So I will go ahead and undo that modification by pressing Ctrl+Z or Command+Z
on the Mac. What we need to do is to choose a better source point and I like
this little tree right there in another set, I will go ahead and press the Alt
key or the Option key on the Mac, keep that key down for a moment so that you
can see this articulated tree right there and I will go ahead and Alt-click or
Option-click right on it. Now I have got that guy loaded as you can
see and I will move over to the bank building and I will paint pretty high actually.
Right about there is going to do us pretty well and you can see that we
are painting away a lot of stuff and painting into the bank building and then I
am going to paint down, but I still have a little bit of driftiness right there.
Do you see what I am talking about where it's a little bit of softness
that doesn't make sense? Like this tree looks ultra hard. That's great and so
it looks like it's a credible part of our composition once again.
So I am going to go up to the Options Bar right there and I am going to turn
off the Aligned check box, so that I can keep painting with that same piece of
tree over and over and then I will go ahead and drag down like so and that
looks pretty good. We have a nice kind of mix of the various trees going on.
Now let's go over to the left side of the image and a problem here is that
things are little more barren, we don't have nearly as many trees. So if I just
start painting like so then it's really getting me hard to control what I am
doing, anyway it's a mess. So I am going to undo that modification and
I will show you, this really great trick. Again, I go up to the Mode menu right
there and I don't expect you, I need to say this, I don't expect you to retain
any of this. I am really just trying to give you a sense of what you can
accomplish, the specific details of, which we will explore in later chapters. I
know I keep saying that, but if you like I need to keep saying that.
I am going to go up to this Mode menu, click on it and I am going to choose
Behind so that we are painting new trees behind the layer so in the region
behind the other trees. We are still working on the active layer, that rolling
hills layer, and I can see of course a preview of my brush right there. I am
going to keep it fairly high, so that we were painting on top of that rear
building and notice we are putting trees, new trees into the background.
Now I am not quite so happy with-- well, actually that looks pretty good.
I shouldn't say I am not happy with it. I am happy with it. That looks great, but
we are not covering up enough of this building. So I think I will go ahead and
undo that modification and I will start higher like so and more to the left,
and I will paint again and now it looks like we are painting away that building
pretty nicely and I will go all the way over here to the -- now this is kind of
where things fall apart a little bit here over on the right hand side because
we are painting pretty high. We are actually painting a pretty tall crest of
tress and I run out. Notice that I have got a sharp outline right there where I
ran out of tree details because I ran into this edge.
All right, so you know what? I am going to undo that modification once again,
sometimes this is the kind of stuff you just have to do and I am going to paint
starting right there. So I don't run out of tree detail over there on to right
hand side and also so that I don't end up creating too tall of a crest of trees
and I think what I really need to do is establish a new source point.
So I will come back to this right hand region of the image over here and I will
go ahead and Option-click or Alt-click right about there in order to set that
as a source of my cloning, so that I have a lot of stuff to work with and then
I will click and drag like so in order to paint over that region of the image
and I am going to paint over the Safeway as well.
Then if we need to add still more trees as we most certainly do, then I could
Alt-click or Option Click in order to set yet another source point and I could
paint like this and now I am really covering up those details quite nicely. I
think at every time I am painting, I am sending more tress into the background.
So in back of our current forest of trees, then I will paint these guys in
there as well and I would say now at this point we have completely covered up
those background buildings. So done a pretty good job.
I just need to make sure that we don't have any of these kind of -- well
actually that looks pretty good. I was going to say this kind of nonsense right
here, where the trees drift off gently into the background but that's not what
we are seeing, those are some background bushes and I could choose to cover
them up if I wanted to by painting in some more trees but I am not going to, I
think that looks all right. Now what doesn't look all right is the transitions
between the original trees on this layer and the new background foliage.
So we have some sort of neon edges going on and we will get rid of those
by changing the mode from Behind, back to Normal so that we can paint over these
trees and then I will just set about painting these trees sort of away, you
know arbitrarily here and there inside of the image and this is a kind of
stuff when you start cloning, you -- A, got to be very careful about what clones
you design to apply and B, you got to do an awful lot of cloning in order to
resolve the discrepancy. So that you have some credible modification inside of
your image and I would say this looks pretty done good.
Now the funny thing is you and I know that those trees, a lot of those trees
are absolute forgeries, and yet I will go ahead and switch back to my
rectangular Marquee tool just so that I don't have a cursor. If I bring back my
Layers palette by pressing Shift+Tab and then turn off rolling hills for a
moment, it's kind of a surprise to see all that stuff in the foreground.
We did an awfully nice job of covering it up with all of the stuff right here
and if I feel like, you know what, I feel like I need to raise the rolling
hills just a little bit, so then I have little bit of wiggle room between the
stuff that I am covering up and the new stuff on top of this layer right here.
Then I could switch back to my Move tool and then I could press Shift+Up Arrow,
maybe two times in a row just like that, in order to raise those rolling hills
just a little bit higher and there we have it. I think this looks pretty done. Nice,
folks. Now that I still need to enhance the scariness
of my scene and we are going to do that by applying a couple of additional
adjustment layers. This time though, we are going to affect the entire composition.
Stay tuned.