Perfect Wedding Photos

For the purpose of this tutorial, I've taken a photo from a wedding I photographed a few weeks ago, I've already done a conversion from RAW and resized the photo down to 1400x933 pixels @ 72dpi just for the tutorial. Normally I wouldn't resize the photo.

We had a lovely little jetty to do some location photos, but there were a few issues with some of the photos. First issue was a adistracting pole at the end of the jetty and the second issue was a fair amount of boat activity, causing wash and waves in the water. I am going to show you how to use the clone tool, the healing brush and a few tricks to make this something worth hanging on the wedding couple's wall.

Now, into our tutorial:

Step 1:

We're starting with a pretty decent photo, nice composition and good detail, feel free to click on it, save it to your computer and follow along in the tutorial:

We're going to start by getting rid of everything that we don't want in the image.. we'll start with the white wash on the left hand side of the image. Select the Clone Stamp Tool:

The Clone Stamp Tool works by creating a stamp of what ever you define as your source material. So we're going to define our source material by holding down Alt and selecting a nice bit of water in the middle left area where there isn't any disturbance from the boat. I've selected the area in red:

And then I'm going to paint over the white wash and the waves as show over the next series of images:

I've started up the top left of the white wash and moved my way across the image.. don't forget to redefine your pattern again and again as needed by using the Alt key to select your clone source.

Try to keep shadows and high lights fairly consistant, the eye won't look for cloning and alterations when you keep things consistant, I've outlined the areas that I've tried to keep fairly consistant in the water:

Keep painting until you have covered most of the area and are happy with the look of the water. When you come to detailed areas like just near the jetty, where you don't want to cover things like the jetty, use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select the area you want to work with in:

Then carry on cloning within the selected area:

For the rest of the cloning, I am going to provide a small video with no audio on the cloning sequence: Cloning process

Let me know what you think please.. it's my first little video. I plan to do some more videos soon.. probably some with audio as well.

Anyway, now that we have cloned out everything that we didn't want in the photo it's time to move on to the next step.

Step 2:

For this shot, I think it will work better in a sepia tone, rather than colour. So we're going to create an adjustment layer.  (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation or you can use the new adjustment layer shortcut at the bottom of the layers palette). I've used the following settings:

The image is starting to look a bit better, but we are not finished yet! We're going to adjust some more curves and make sure that the focal point is the couple on the jetty.

Step 3:

Select the lasso tool and draw a rough outline around the photo, about quater of the way from the edge, then go Select > Modify > Feather and put in 150 pixels, then select inverse by either going to Select > Inverse or pressing Ctrl+Shift+I.

Step 4:

Create a new adjustment layer and select curves, make your curve look something like this:

And that's your completed image: