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It’s been a while since I posted a TLC Tuesday episode, so let’s do one today.  Here we have an image from Vicki and Tom’s wedding that I posted yesterday; Vicki is standing in the doorway of St. Paul Cathedral with her father, just a moment before walking down the aisle.

Let’s start with the original image, SOOC, with the default raw settings in Lightroom.

The image is a little crooked, and seems a little too warm to me.  The first thing I did was to straighten the crop and cool down the white balance in Lightroom.  I also added a little more contrast and increased the blacks by a notch or two.  I pulled the recovery slider to 10 or so to bring down the highlights in the stained glass windows, and also used the adjustment brush to bring down the exposure in the windows.

The next step was removing the exit signs, which I felt detracted from the image.  I used the patch tool in Photoshop to do this.

And of course, I needed to clone out the church lady who was standing behind the bride.  Oh universal Church Lady, I am fond of you, but why must you linger in the doorway for every. single. wedding?

Ok, now time to remove the videographer.  For those of you familiar with the clone tool and patch tool, you already know what a difficult job this is because of where he is standing.  I need to reproduce the line of pews that he is covering, but because of perspective, I can’t just sample another area and clone it in over him.  So instead,  I used the lasso tool to select the pews on the opposite side, as well as a good portion of the area above the pews, since he is partially covering the wall as well.  I then copied the selection, pasted it back onto the image, making it a new layer.  I used the transform tool to flip it horizontally, then dragged it over the videographer and aligned everything to blend in.  I added a layer mask and brushed out any areas along the edge of the pasted selection that did not match up perfectly.

Ta da!  The final product, sans distractions.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of TLC Tuesdays!