| You've probably accidentally taken (or posed for) a picture in which a tree or a lamp or some other object appears to be growing out of someone's head. It's just a matter of standing in front of the lamp at just the right spot, and you end up looking like you're wearing a lampshade. If you're standing in front of a row of trees, with the right positioning, you can look like the pot for a very large plant. What to do? Perform a cranial tree-ectomy or a lamposuction and remove that unwanted growth! To perform these types of surgery, you simply move the tree or lamp (or whatever) so that it's still in the picture but not in an unfortunate spot. You can get rid of the offending object entirely, but if you think the tree or lamp is a nice feature in the picture or if you have no realistic alternative to replace it, you can move it much more easily than you can lose it. Moving a tree or other object just enough so that it's not coming out of someone's head in the photo requires two tools: a selection tool (the following steps use the Lasso) and a Move tool. Any editing software worth its salt has both of these tools, and they work very much the same as this Photoshop Elements-based procedure: 1. Open the photo with the offending tree and make sure that the tree is active in the workspace. 2. Activate the selection tool of your choice. You want to use a freeform selection tool rather than one that selects only rectangular or elliptical areas. 3. Select the tree (or lamp, or whatever is in an inopportune spot). 4. Activate your image editor's Move tool and then click the selected object. 5. Drag the object to another spot. A few inches away from the person's head usually does the trick. 6. Deselect the moved object. 7. With one of the tools for filling in content, fill in the hole that's left behind after you move the object. Maybe the filling doesn't quite blend in with the surroundings because of a sharp or otherwise obvious edge to the filling, so you may need to do a little recovery. 8. Use any of the following tools/techniques to put the finishing touches on your image: • Blur tool: Set to a low strength, to soften any obvious edges on the filled-in content • Smudge tool: Also set to a low strength, to smear any hard edges between similar content • Clone tool: To apply additional content on top of the unwanted hard edge, and then blur or smudge again as you need 9. When the image looks perfect, save it.  | Consider saving the image with a new name (using the Save As command so that you can rename it) to preserve the pre-tree-ectomy version for amusement or blackmail. |
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