Perform extreme colour adjustments

Where lighting or environmental conditions are not as expected, software can be a powerful solution

DUPLICATE THE BACKGROUND

To make the process as non-destructive as possible and ensure we can adjust any automatic changes from Photoshop, make a copy of the background layer (Cmd/Ctrl-J) and work on this. The ability to use layer masking will be useful later.

MAKE A SELECTION

Use one of the Lasso tools to make a selection of the object you need to move within the frame. We used the Polygonal Lasso here to roughly draw an outline around the tree. Make sure you try to follow the object’s shape as much as possible.

MOVE THE OBJECT

Here the tree is a little too close to the frame edge

– a placement that was necessary to compose out visual distractions. To move it further into the scene, we used the Content Aware Move Tool (J) to drag the selection to the right.

REPAIR SEAMS

Photoshop will automatically attempt to patch and fill the space left by the move. Here the pattern of the tree is complex so we masked out the areas of mismatching sky colour on the duplicate layer using a medium brush, with moderate hardness.

EXTEND THE CANVAS

To further balance the composition we will add more land and sky to the left of the tree. Use the Crop Tool (C) to extend the canvas and fill it with the Background Colour. Select this new canvas with the Magic Wand (W), go to Edit>Fill.

FILL EMPTY SPACE

Choose Content Aware as the method under the Use dropdown menu. Photoshop will sample the surrounding canvas to derive colour and texture. This image has a uniform sky but in more complex scenes, some retouching may be necessary.