I was asked by a coworker if I could help her with a photo. She had a photo that her Mom had given her and wanted to have just her Moms brother in the photo and remove the woman.

She stated that her brother had a "professional" Photographer remove the woman, but received the second photo..

Step 1: Can You Please Remove the Arm

So my first thought, sure I would love to take on this challenge.....

So a little background on me.

I have been a Photographer for 40 years, from film to digital. I have been using photoshop for over 12 years, with Little League Baseball, High School Lacrosse and just having fun with people, mainly coworkers.

So I had to have a little fun and REMOVE the arm, see photo 1

Vision.. One thing that is needed with a good photographer and person that works photoshop is Vision. I have a scene now what can I do with it to make it better.. See photos 2 and 3.. Here I took a customer and asked to have him stand next to some wall paper and put his arm up like he was leaning against some pillars.

My Vision was to add a dock, put fish in his hand, add rings in the water by his legs and give him a nice fishing hat. This was a simple photoshop as I just had to erase the legs and size all that I added..

Lets get back to the Man and Woman..

Step 2: Remove Woman and Arm

To remove the woman I used the magnetic lasso and traced the man and outside edge and removed with foreground color.

As the arm is on a solid color background, I captured the color and painted the arm to remove it.... But the man does not have a collar on his right side. Simple

Use the lasso tool and capture the collar on the left side. Note that you don't need to be perfect as you can clean up afterwards.

Past the new collar and use the erase tool to clean up..

I also needed to rebuild the stair railing, which I simply copied the adjacent railing and pasted it to fill in.

Step 3: The Pledge Hand

As the man still had a hand on his chest.. Pledge allegiance to the flag.. I though it might look better without the hand.. Here I used the lasso tool and captured the hand then used content aware and deleted the hand..

But ... The man is not framed in the photo... i.e. He is too the left of the photo not centered..

So I thought why not add a photo on the wall.. See photos 2 an 3.

Step 4: The Final Photo

After all the work removing and rebuilding the background I thought to capture the man and center him. With this I had to capture the left arm and copy it and flip it to add to the right side..

When I gave the photo to her I included all the other photos so her and her Mom could enjoy the results..

Photoshop is not cheap, but I have not used a photo editing program anywhere near the quality of this product.