PS Week 3: An Argentine Church

Snapshot of church and garage, Argentina
(1024 x 768 pixels, 628 KB)

The top photo was taken on a trip to northern Argentina. The tour bus stopped for gas and I noticed an unusual church across the street so I took the snapshot and forgot about it. Later, I noticed that power lines were dangling right through the middle of the picture. Now, years later, I want to remove the power line and print the picture.

Project: Remove the power line, adjust tones and sharpen image.

I opened the original snapshot in Lightroom Develop module. With the basic panel sliders, I adjusted the exposure and highlights and passed the file to Photoshop CC for editing.

Step 1: Duplicate the background and rename layer. Remove the power line on the left and right sides of the church with the clone tool. The large power pole on the right of the church was not removed.

Step 2: Duplicate the layer and select with the lasso tool the small pole that is between church and the large pole. Remove the small pole by content-aware fill of the selection. Clean up with the clone tool.

Step 3: Duplicate the layer and begin removing the power line as it crossed the church. Use the patch tool to replace the line where it crosses bricks, and the clone tool where the line crosses solid colored wall areas. (Merge these three layers into a single layer.)

Step 4: Add a curves adjustment layer to lighten the road and darken the sky and add mid-tone contrast.

Step 5: Merge all layers into a single layer and apply smart sharpen (the magic short cut is: Command/Shift/Option E)

Step 6: Save the photo as tif (layers and all, 107 mb), and save a jpg (1024 x 768) for the blog. The result is the photo below: 

Final image,  church and garage ( 1024 x 768 pixels, 592 KB) 

Carto

Note: The tif file will be reduced in size if the merged/sharpened layer is deleted (new size 44.5 mb).
(Click on any photo to enlarge and bring up a slide show of the images.)