How often do we take a picture only to find it's not quite what we saw at the time. Photoshop gives us a second chance to recreate our image.

Our image was taken with a Coolpix 990 at an American Civil War Society event at the Usk festival. As soon as we look at our image it's obvious what the problems are. It was the expressions on the children's faces that caught our attention, so we need to crop in closer. It's well worth looking at our images closely as sometimes a simple crop can improve the overall composition.

Select from our tools box the Cropping Tool short cut C on our keyboard and drag it over our image selecting the area we wish to crop (dia 2). The cropping frame has grab handles which allows us to adjust the frame as we require. Once happy with our selection double click or strike the enter key to crop (dia 3).

We now need to remove the other distractions. Call up the layers pallet Window >Show Layers or short cut F7 on the keyboard, click on the Create new layer icon (dia 5).

From our tool palette we select our Cloning tool or Rubber stamp(short cut S). Double clicking on the cloning tool brings up the Rubber Stamp Options box. Make sure we tick the 'Use all Layers and Aligned' this will enable us to use the clone tool on our new layer (dia 6).

Working on our new empty layer we select a soft edge brush for our clone tool (dia 7). Select an area which is similar to the area we wish to clone, press the Alt key and the cursor changes to a Target shape, click to make the selection. Now release the Alt key, move the cloning tool over the area we are going to clone, and hold down the left mouse button. The pixels will then be transferred from the target area to the area we are cloning. Continue cloning and re-adjusting the target area until we have removed all the distractions. The benefit of cloning onto a new empty lay allows us to delete the layer if we are not happy with the end result whilst leaving our original image untouched (dia 8).

Once we have finished we can now flatten and save our image. Our image certainly look a lot more appealing than our original but it can still be enhanced with a few simple steps. Part 2 Click here