Yesterday was a beautiful fall day here in east Central Missouri. My husband and I took advantage of this gorgeous weather to take a motorcycle ride down through the wine country of southwestern St. Charles County. We traveled some of the back roads and saw some of the most bucolic sights. We came across this barn, and I love barns, so I photographed it. When I got home and uploaded the photo, I realized the photo had been ruined by the yellow street sign almost smack dab in the center of the photo. No problem. Through the wonders of Photoshop, I was able to remove the barn and at the same time using filters and blend modes, give the photo the look of a more grainy photograph that might have been taken many years ago. Here’s the original photo:

I first tried Photoshop’s fantastic Content-Aware Fill to remove the fence but this time, because of the horizontal lines in the fence, it didn’t work out, causing the fence to appear jagged in the fill area. I then decided to copy and paste a segment of the fence over the sign. Using the clone stamp, the spot healing brush, eraser and blur tools, I was able to make the fence completely disappear.

After I was satisfied with the fence, I made a copy of the layer (ctl+J), changed the blend mode to soft light and applied the highpass filter. When I was pleased with that outcome, I used a gradient map to change the image to grayscale, brought in the color copy again and lowered the opacity. I kept playing with adding more copies of the original photo and changing blend modes until I got the feel I wanted.