London Response - Idea 2

For my second idea, I plan to take a photo and manipulate it to extremes - taking out a whole object and replacing it so that it appears as though everything in the picture is real and not photoshopped (or computer generated as such)

The image that I have in question is this -

This image at the moment does not look like anything special. Firstly, the composition is ruined by the object on the left hand side. If this weren't there when the photo was taken, then a much clearer, aesthetically pleasing image would have been taken. However, my plan is to photoshop the car on the left out of the image. Already, I have my concerns about some areas that I feel will affected. The first big issue is shadows. When I remove the car and replace it with gravel/road texture, I will need to recreate the different levels of light that are apparent in the picture in order to keep the picture looking natural. Underneath the Range Rover (the big white car) in the background there is the shadow directly under the car which will need to be carried on, and then the shadow the 458 (grey car) makes on the road.
With Adobe Photoshop CS6, there was the introduction of the 'content aware' tool which takes a selected section of the image and attempts to remove it and replace it with the background. From previous experiments with this tool, I have found that it only really works with small areas and areas where there is only one or two textures/colors current.

To start, I placed the image into Adobe Lightroom and adjusted the general elements of the image - contrast, highlights, shadows, exposure, whites and blacks. This made the image easier to work with as the definition of the highlights and shadows was much stronger.

I now needed to being the editing of the car on the left and focus on removing it, whilst keeping the image looking natural. I began by removing the car and getting the road texture over the top. At this stage I was not looking necessarily for color matches, just texture matches. To do this, I used the 'clone-stamp' tool and selected some road from the left and brushed over the car on the left with it. The outcome was messy, but it gave me the building blocks for the image.

As clear in this picture, the colors and shadows of the image do not match up, so I now needed to work on creating these shadows.

I started down the bottom of the image and focused on the darker tones of the image. I again used to 'clone-stamp' tool and selected areas from under the car and brushed with a very soft, small brush around the area to match up the shadows and colors.














However, at this stage, I began to realise that there would be too much negative space under the main focus of the image (458 - Dark Grey) and it would affect the rules of thirds rule of the image. To overcome this, I started again and cropped the image so that I was working with the exact area necessary. I took out a majority of the car on the left. This changed the dynamics of the image as it moved the main subject closer to the bottom of the image, which reduces the negative space of the road making the eye be drawn more to the largest (most important) part of the image.

I started again applying the same process and removed the car from the left and began to match up and create the tones for the image.

In the image above, you can see the progress has been made. The area middle left by the white Range Rover has been completed. The shadow has been extended and the yellow line has been continued to the end of the image. I have started to match the textures and colors of the gravel as well in this part of the image.
To finish the image, I duplicated the layer and began to falsify the shadow made by the car, by taking samples of shaded areas at different intensities and mapped them onto the bottom left hand of the image. I then turned the opacity down to roughly 60% which meant any levels that were incorrect would be tones down and not look as intense as they did before - creating a natural looking shadow.

Final Image -