How can you clone out a area and feather the edges so that it doesn't look so obvious that the area was cloned? I would like to clone out the corner in the ceiling above his right shoulder. Any comments on this photo are welcomed.

In photoshop, just using a softer setting on your clone brush should help.

Not sure exactly what your problem is with this, but just a couple of general pointers:

- always use a very soft brush
- always clone to a new empty layer, then you can use a mask to blend in the cloned area.

Rô

Or just replace the background altogether

Or just replace the background altogether
How did you achieve that?

In this case, probably the easiest fix is to select and copy a piece of the gray background from the top left, paste it to a new layer, and stretch it using the free transform tool. Move that selection to cover the area over the right shoulder (with pleny of overlap on the subject and the area above the ceiling line). Then put a black mask on that layer and paint back in with white to eliminate the line. This method takes just a couple of minutes.

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/9745/clonekg5.jpg
I like what you done, but couldn't quite follow along with your process.

It also helps (in addition to using a nice soft cloning brush and, sometimes, another layer) to put your brush on a low opacity -- a low opacity, in my opnion, is a must for LARGE-AREA cloning -- not so much for spot blemish removal, cause you'll lose texture, but for big areas, like this one, no more than 50%, I'd say (and that happens to be what I used in my attachment.)

Also, I don't know if you put that black border on, but I'll go ahead and tell you, unless you have an incredibly steady hand (and eye), something like that is going to give you fits. It you didn't put it on, yikes -- you just gotta be careful and use more layers. If you DID put it on, I'd suggest always making something like that a finishing touch, and ALWAYS saving a version that doesn't have it applied.

:) Jen

Here is my entry.
dc

besides the already mentioned light opacity and soft brushes, you want to come at a clone like this from many angles. i started at the top right of the area to be cloned and worked down. i then came at it from the bottom of the area. as i work these two back and forth i lower the opacity to give a smoother blend until it looks right.

on the black border, i put my cursor half way over the black edge and move it down, then do the same at the bottom and move up. this copies the black part back onto itself, leaving it unchanged but clones out the white area as desired.

when you get around the edges, especially around the jaw in this one, you simply lower the brush size AND the hardness. the smaller the brush, the smaller the range that the hardness extends out to, so you have to decrease the hardness to get the nice feathering you had when the brush was larger.

i also ran around the edge of the person and the background and cloned out the jpg artifacting 'echo'.

i also used nancyj's paint with light 'cheat' to punch up the image a bit.