Tuesday Tips & Pics - Cleaning Up Your Background

Hey everyone! I know I promised everyone some before and afters from my session with Jake and Brooke, so here are a few.  They are some of my favorite shots from the session but they took soo long to edit!

Tips - I always do my cloning on a duplicate layer.  That way I can always easily go back to the original image and start over if I need to, and more importantly I can add a layer mask.

For these pictures I really wanted to remove some of the distracting background elements. I cloned these things out before I did any of my other editing to these pictures.  I duplicated my layer and cloned the backgrounds and I didn't worry too much about going over my subjects at this point. When I was done, I lowered the opacity of that layer so I can see where I covered up things I didn't want to cover up.  Then I added a layer mask and painted in black on the layer mask over the kids or anywhere I messed up.  If I messed up on my layer mask, I could switch back to white to erase my erasure! This was the easiest way for me with this pictures since they all required cloning so close to my subjects.  I zoomed in on certain areas where need to erase the cloning carefully around the edges.

After my cloning, I ran some Florabella actions--I think I used ShiShi and Envy for these, on low opacity's. Also, on the two pictures with brick I added a layer of texture on overlay, on a low opacity, and removed the texture from my subject.  I felt this helped my cloning on the brick blend better.  Here are my before and afters:

Pics







I really feel like the cloning in these pictures helped draw the attention to the subjects even more. Though don't look at it too closely or you'll see the lines in the brick don't all match up!

What have you guys been shooting? Link up below!