In many places in the world, photographers are faced with famous monuments and ancient ruins that have been visually trashed with all kinds of junk: scaffolding used for renovation, garbage cans, netting used to keep pigeons and bats out, steel supports, wires and cables of every description, and litter. We are very lucky to have Photoshop to handle many of these problems, but even that isn’t a guaranteed solution.
In my recent trip to Italy, I was constantly frustrated by all this stuff, but at least I knew I could do something about it. I’ve uploaded two pairs of pictures to show you the challenges I faced in the actual scene, and then I show what I did with it. Photoshop isn’t magic; it has to replace the clutter and the junk with something taken from another place in the picture or, possibly, something from another picture.
I first visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 1968 before I knew anything about photography. I was looking forward to going back, but the dramatic structure known for leaning at a precarious angle was uncluttered when I first saw it. Now there are structural supports, railings, netting, and steel bands around columns to hold it together and to prevent it from eventually falling over. It’s nice to know that scientists have done this, but artistically it was almost not worth shooting. I studied the structure, seeing in my mind how I might repair the visual damage when I got home, and then I took pictures of it from every angle I could think of.
Study the original image and you can appreciate the challenge (the red arrows point to all the stuff I had to eliminate). In the final rendition, replacing the sky was easy. That was just a cut and paste job in CS2. Notice the type of sky I used – dark gray instead of blue. The diffused light on the tower called for the type of sky that would make sense with soft lighting. To get rid of all the other stuff, I enlarged the picture up to 300% and began using the clone tool to remove the modern structural apparatus. Once in a while I used the healing brush, but 99% of this was done strictly with the clone tool. The entire process took me two hours.
The detail shot of the famous Coliseum, where gladiators once fought and died, was done at twilight. This brilliant engineering marvel from 2000 years ago is ringed in an amazing amount of bars and steel mesh. You only see a little of it here, but look inside the middle arches. The lights are shining on this mesh, and it seriously detracts from the Coliseum. Again, I used the clone tool, but what could I clone into this? I didn’t want to fill the arch with black because the one arch on the right didn’t have the mesh installed in it and it wasn’t black. I had to use something that looked correct with respect to the lighting.
What I did was clone from that one arch in the middle row at the far right into the other arches, one by one, until the steel mesh was meticulously replaced. I then eliminated the railing, and now the Coliseum looked as it should look, without modern contraptions (except the lighting) getting in the way of our appreciation of this world famous place.
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