In Photoshop, how can I remove the foreground in a photo?

Question

Im trying to get the cage in front of zoo animals to disappear, and Im so lost. Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

Learn to use the clone tool. You've got a lot of work ahead of you. You have to pick up parts of the animal that look like the parts that are behind the bars and "color" over the bars.

Here's an example, although I was half-way done gettign rid of the utility wires before I decided to post it as a tutorial. Read the captions.

Before: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/723758843/in/set-72157601339945649/

After: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/733766045/in/set-72157601339945649/

Answer 2

I assume you were using a digital camera and not and X-ray machine, so you only photographed PART of the animals. If you want to retouch the photographs to make the cages magically vanish, you'll have to replace all the pixels of the iron bars with made up pixels of animals.
Photoshop lets you do this pixel by pixel (pick a color, any color for each pixel) or you can use the built-in tools to speed things up: the magic wand to isolate the bars, the cloning tool to paint in new areas based on existing bits, etc. You can also get plug-ins for Photoshop, such as Image Doctor, to partially automate this process. Image Doctor has a feature called smart-fill that will 'remove' foreground objects based entirely on guess work. I've used Image Doctor myself with mixed success. It generally saves you a bit of time, but you'll still need to work out the details by hand. It's time consuming.
My advice is to just dive in there and learn as you go. Save a copy of the picture as a Photoshop file first, so you can't harm the original photograph. And as a further safety measure, inside the Photoshop file, use a layer (or several layers) when you start filling in the blanks. That makes it easier to undo mistakes.

Answer 3

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