Mastering Photoshop's Latest Tools

I’ve been a bit quieter during the holiday season, which gave me time to explore the new tools that Photoshop seems to add almost daily. While I was aware of most of them, I hadn’t had a chance to try out some of the recent additions. I found this image on one of the free sites and decided to remove all the wire shadows crossing the subject’s face and body using some of the improved tools. I primarily used the upgraded ‘Remove Tool’; this tool really is a game-changer in my opinion, especially effective in ‘Find Distractions’. Unfortunately, when I attempted to use it for one-click removal in the ‘Wires and Cables’ function, it crashed Photoshop every single time! I even tried it in Photoshop Beta, but it crashed there as well!

I also did some traditional cloning in places and applied dodging and burning on a ‘soft light’ layer. Additionally, I created a ‘noise’ layer on top of the layer stack using the fairly recent ‘Add Grain’ slider in ‘Effects’ in Camera Raw to blend everything.

Here’s the final result. I’m quite pleased with it, but without client approval, I’m sure I’ve overlooked something obvious!