Bodega Bay provides a good harbor and a sheltered bay on the northern California coast. It is in Sonoma County about 75 miles north of San Francisco. On the ocean side the Harbor is protected by a line of steep hills and ocean bluffs. Bodega Head provides a view of spectacular surf and rocky coast, and in season there are migrating whales to view. If you would like to photograph a group of people in silhouette, you can go there just about any weekend afternoon. The coastal scenery is the real reason for photographers to be there, but as long as one is there with a camera …

For any group in motion the trick is to catch an instant when something at least a little unusual is happening. I took a couple of photos of a woman with a dog walking toward the bluff top. I used with a wide angle lens, leaving the niceties of composition to a time after there were images in the camera. This one has potential:

There are distracting objects in the foreground and too much blank sky. The first steo is to crop the image:

Bringing the lower edge up to get rid of the minivan hood would leave the woman almost standing on the bottom edge of the image. I want to show some of the shadow to provide a cue to the slope. That leaves some of the hood in the image. It’s difficult to see on the small version of the image, but there is also a radio antenna on the vehicle extending up into the scene.

The rubber stamp tool in Photoshop™ can be used to paint over these distractions. The tool takes a separate part of the image and copies it to where the cursor is pointed when the left button of the mouse is clicked. Select the rubber stamp icon from the palette on the left edge of the screen, then adjust the brush size on the scale under the menu bar. Alt-click on the spot to copy from, then move the cursor to where the copy is to go and click. The initial alt-click followed by a click defines the place to copy from relative to the cursor. If the initial alt-click is 100 pixels to the left and 25 pixels up from the initial paint point, all future painting will be from a point relative to the cursor at that distance and direction away. To redefine it, alt-click and then click again.

The van hood is a large area, so I selected a 44 pixel area for the brush. The alt-click point (the source) is shown as a purple square below, and the initial click (the destination) is shown as a purple disk. Photoshop uses its regular cursors, but those are hard to see on reduced images.

Holding the mouse button down while moving the mouse paints in the area. Usually it’s best to use a brush with a feathered edge to blend in the region. Photoshop copies from the image as it was before the mouse button was pressed. If it starts to copy the area you want to fill in, release the button and re-click. That continues with the image as modified. To fill a large area start by alt-clicking a point fairly far away.

The narrow antenna is treated with a smaller brush (20 pixels) copying from a near point.

In natural scenes it is usually best to pick source and destination points that are nearly horizontal. Perspective tends to make horizontally striated textures, and the sky fades with the distance from the horizon, so a better match is obtained horizontally.

The painting process replicates distinctive features. That may catch the eye. Having two identical odd-shaped dark shadows near each other is a giveaway that something naughty has happened. To break up the repetition, use a different brush size and a different copy distance to spot over such features.

Just click on major features with the new brush. It isn’t necessary to hold down the button and paint very much.

Here is the final result.

The technique is quickly applied, and not difficult. It is useful for removing distracting objects, fillng in bits clipped off in the course of panoramic projections, distortion corrections, and filling corners nipped in rotations. Photoshop has other tools, such as the healing brush, that are also useful.