Remove the Man exercise 2023

 In today's session we practiced using Adobe Photoshop's features of Clone Stamping and image manipulation to remove a man from a picture of a street. This exercise took approximately four and a half hours in total. Additionally, we were given the task of adding text to the blank road sign in the right of the image with our own street name, whilst keeping the plant covering the sign overlapping the text. Seen below is the original image of the man and the street we were given to work with, as well as my end product after removing the man and editing in text onto the sign.
 

First I set the image as a layer, changing it from a background. Then I began to remove the man by selecting him with the object selection tool and removing him, as well as the bag he was holding. To fill in the space he left I mainly used the clone stamp tool to replace the bricks of the wall and pavement. One of our tasks way having the wall stay the exact same as it is in real life, therefor I used other images of the street and wall without the man there to gain a better reference as to what it should look like. Bellow are the two images I used as reference during my process.

After a long process of removing the man from the street and touching up certain areas to make them look more crisp and natural, such as the edge of the wall and the cracks, I then removed the reflection of the man from the window. This took considerably less time to do in a way that looks nice, due to the smaller area to work in and the small size of the reflection. The last part of the exercise I saw to was editing the sign. To do this I separated the plant onto a layer above my edited image, then I spend about an hour manually erasing around the plant, adding patches of transparency in parts to make it seem more natural and not just like I slapped a picture of a plant over the text. Once that was done I added in the text onto the street sign. To make it more believable I chose the same font used in actual street signs in the UK, Highway Gothic, and warped the perspective of the text to make it line up better with the sign. A final touch I added to the text was a slight inner bevel to make it look like the text was reflecting light, as well as adding a slight shadow under the plant so it seemed more realistic.

As my first photoshop exercise of the course I'm fully aware that the end result isn't perfect, though I'm still happy with what I've made with the time provided. Certain parts remain slightly blurry and discoloured due to the clone stamping, though it's only really noticeable upon zooming in. I might come back to edit the image again later on in the course once I'm more experienced with these programmes in order to gauge how far my skills have developed, but for now I'm satisfied with my work today.