How To: Clean Up a Background Using Symmetry
A distracting background can seriously detract from even the most beautiful or interesting subject. But, with a little help from Photoshop, it's possible to take the edge off of an annoyingly cluttered image.
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Photographers have lots of tricks for dealing with clutter and other unwanted picture elements. You can, for example, set a large aperture to defocus the fore- or background. Or, by brightly lighting a foreground subject, you can set exposures to darken background mess until it essentially disappears.
Jesse Swallow of Melbourne, Australia, offers a less common technique that works especially with heavily lined subjects. Waiting for a Melbourne tram one rainy August evening, he was struck by the dynamic contrast of richly saturated warm- and cool-toned light reflecting off a metallic bench. When he composed the scene so that the reflections were their brightest, however, the right side of his picture was a line of ugly storefronts.
No problem! He used software to crop out the storefronts and replace them with a mirror image of the scene.
The technique solved the storefront problem, and, because his subject was largely receding lines and movement, the photo has a fun and vortexy depth, too.