A Photoshop editing challenge to myself (cloning and spot healing brush in action)

Last week, on my long flight home from New York, after catching up on my email and other work, I had another couple of hours to kill before landing in San Francisco. I had this one photo of a man painting in Central Park, but really was not happy with the fence in the shot. I tried to walk to a different position to shoot this without the fence, but since he was right against it, that was not possible. With time to kill, I decided to try and edit out the fence, one link at a time!

This is the original image. I love the light on the face of the painter, and I like the framing with the two ladies talking in the background. But, as I mentioned, the fence really bugged me. So..time to go to work with the healing brush and clone tool in Adobe Photoshop CS5.

After a couple of hours, I was able to remove more than half of the fence and recreate some of the painter's stand that was covered by the green fence post.

I was zoomed way in on the image when removing each link of the fence. This was tedious work, with the amount of fence that was in the image.

After 4 hours of work, this is the completed image. If you did not see the original image (above), would you have been fooled?

Clearly, I could not afford to make this a habit. Sure... it was a fun challenge and it did test my Photoshop skills, but it also tested my patience. I can also tell you that this was easier to complete on my main editing machine at home. Not only did I have a faster Mac with a 30" Cinema Display, but I also had my Wacom Tablet and no turbulence to deal with. :)