Above is the original picture of the ATR 42-500, a FinnComm airliner on the runway in Kuopio, Finland. The sunrise is beautiful and the mood is magical with the plane in the mist. Unfortunately the photographer (a friend of mine) is visible as a reflection in the window. So, I was asked to do something about it. I must say the project was challenging. You can see the result below.
How I did it? Well, that´s a long story. For this project, the healingpatch sure came in handy.
-I created a new layer, chose a good color with the colorpicker and painted in the reflections. I was careful not to paint too large areas at once. I then control-clicked the layer, making a selection, merged the two layers by pressing ctrl-e, and changed the tool to the healingpatch by pressing the j-key. I dragged the selection to an area where the structure was similar to the area I was recreating.
The sky was hard to fix. So I ended up making a selection with the magic wand and creating a gradient where I picked the foreground-color with the colorpicker from the darkest part of the sky and the background-color from the light part of the sky. Some serious masking let the sun through while hiding some nasty reflections.
The clonestamp was used on some parts of the fuselage, I used low opacitysettings to avoid sharp edges.
A part of the runway was recreated by painting in the area with a good, dark color, adding noise and changing the opacity to about 30%.
