A crane left parked in front of a sugar factory for months in Baltimore, Maryland, prevented photographer Paul Frederiksen from getting the exact shot he wanted. He had assumed that using Photoshop to erase the obtrusive crane was all but impossible, until Denyer, a UK-based photographer, performed a photo-editing miracle.
The challenge with removing such a large object from a photo is that you have to rebuild the missing areas of a photo that are revealed once it’s gone. For this shot, cloning other parts of the building allowed Denyer to reconstruct obscured windows and walls. But for the ground floors, he was able to cleverly source clean photos of the building—without the crane—using Google Street View.
All in all it took the artist just two hours to turn this throwaway shot into a keeper—although that doesn’t factor in the innumerable hours he spent mastering Photoshop over the years.
