How to perfect your pictures

Often when you're framing an image, you don't think about the positioning of background elements and how they end up attaching themselves to your subject. The lamppost growing out of the woman's head is a perfect example. Adobe Photoshop Elements and most other editing packages have a tool that can duplicate nearby background information over the item you want to remove. It's referred to as cloning.

To amputate the lamppost, select Element's Clone Stamp tool, hold down Alt, place the tool over the area you want to clone (in this case, the horizon to the left of the lamppost), and click to select that location. Release Alt and drag the cursor, which is now just a circle, across the lamp. The previously selected location is cloned over the lamp and replaced with sky and landscape. Proceed carefully until you've cloned the globe out of the sky. Then go back and clone away the section over the hills by repeating the Alt+click+drag procedure.

Use the left or right bracket keys to adjust the size of the cloning brush.