What’s wrong with this picture?

Backgrounds are just as important as subjects in making a photograph successful. If the background is distracting, busy, or annoyingly too light, the picture suffers.

Costumed carnival participants in Venice often pose in front of the Doge’s Palace in San Marco Square, and that’s fine . . . depending on the background stonework, windows, doors, and columns. In this case, the window at the upper right corner is distracting. It takes our attention away from the subjects. The only thing to do was to replace it with stonework that matched the building.

The first thing I did was make a precise selection of the window opening with the pen tool. I saved the selection with Select > save selection, and this made it very easy to complete the next step. I chose the rectangular marque tool and made a selection of the stone blocks at the midde right. I copied this selection to the clipboard with Edit > copy, and then I pasted that into the selection of the window.

Making the selection of the window constrained the new material inside the window frame without any bleeding, smudging, or smearing at the edges. Alternatively, I could have cloned the stonework into the selection of the window. Either way, that selection enabled me to make the edges perfect which makes the composite work believable. §