I always shoot in RAW and process my photographs in the digital darkroom but generally my post-processing only goes as far as making basic adjustments like brightness, contrast, white-balance and cropping. Occasionally I experiment with HDR and Panoramas but I’m usually a bit more of a purist when it comes to the subject matter I capture.

I’ve recently had a go at really ‘cheating the system’ by manipulating some photos to remove distracting elements as well as combining the best elements of different pictures.

The first photo on the left was taken at a skate park on Venice Beach in L.A. While I was really chuffed to get the timing right for this photograph, it bothered me that the two people in the background were distracting and detracted from the distance between that skater’s feet and his board. So using a combination of Photoshop tools I removed the people. I primarily used the clone tool, deleted layers witha very soft eraser and a little bit of Photoshop’s new content-aware fill to remove the people and replace them with the beach, ocean and concrete. A large portion of the concrete was covered so I had to make that up with portions of concrete from other parts of the photo.

The second and third photos I edited were taken over Christmas in Scotland. Trying to freeze active children is quite a challenge, so I got into a habit of taking numerous photos and hoping for the best. In both the examples on the left I had two images of the same scene. Unfortunately neither image was right on its own – someone in focus in one photograph would be blurry in another. So I combined them to get the photograph I was hoping for in the first place.

While I’m pleased enough with the results, I doubt these edits would pass any forensic analysis. I’d rather just capture the image I want in the first place, but it is nice to know that all is not lost if the shot isn’t perfect.