Clone Stamp

If you've ever been on a shoot with a photographer than I'm sure you've had the conversation about getting rid of something that is a distraction to the shot. Have you ever wondered how photographers get rid of distractions? Clone stamp, which is probably the most used function for me anyway in photoshop. Basically to get rid of something, you have to replace it with something, kind of like "copy and paste". However most times it's not that easy and can take almost an hour in certain cases. My least favorite rooms to get rid of things in are all white rooms, because all white rooms vary diversely in degrees of white and while white maybe the absence of all color it certainly takes on varying hues depending on what is near...

So I thought I'd show you some examples of clone stamping that I'm really quite proud of.

In this first instance, the light switch and thermostat just completely distract from the beauty of the moment, of course the rivets in the Phillip Jeffries paper make this quite a complex process.

In this next example, the high gloss cabinetry in South Florida with 15' glass walls across from the kitchen made this kitchen almost impossible and I think it took close to two hours to remove all of the reflections. Normally I would have draped the glass to prevent any reflections in the cabinetry however the sheer scale of the glass wall made it impossible to do so and I had to deal with it in post production.

This last example is me just not paying attention and learning my lesson, mirror can be very very tricky! After getting all of the styling and everything just right and after having combed the image to make sure it was perfect, I then typically take around 5 different exposures and sometimes will blend those later in Photoshop. Well in this instance everyone cleared the room (or so I thought) for me to take the last set of exposures. Look at the feet reflected in the mirrored night stand...

Warm Regards,

Michael