Cropping And Cloning

How to remove distracting objects and create a more pleasing composition

- George Cairns

You can’t always control every element that appears in your photographs. For example, you may not spot a distracting object at the edge of the frame (such as a lamp post or other piece of street furniture) until later.

Some events happen spontaneously, not least when you’re trying to snap unpredictable subjects, such as children or animals), so you may have to shoot first and worry about fine-tuning your picture’s composition or removing unwanted elements later.

Even if you have time to carefully compose your image when you take it, you may not notice artefacts such as sensor (or dust) spots until you view it on your Mac’s large display.

Fortunately, Affinity Photo has all the tools you need to get rid of unwanted objects and create a cleaner, well-composed picture in a few clicks.

In our example image, the horses are hemmed in by taped areas that are ugly and distracting. We’ll show you how to use Affinity Photo’s Clone Brush tool to replace the tape and posts with adjacent patches of grass, leaving the horses to ‘run free’. This brush transplants manually sampled pixels you select using a crosshair cursor into a circular brush tip. We’ll also show you how to use the intelligent Inpainting brush to paint out unwanted objects in a few strokes.