Photoshop help with removing an object

[hollerz]

I have a picture of a friends child, but he has a biscuit or something in his mouth that I'd like to remove. I've tried cloning but because it's in an area with a lot of different shadows, it just looks really bad. I've attached a close up of the area.

Anyone got any tips?

 

[jabbott]

Here is my 5 minute Photoshop job which I'm sure could be done better with more time:

And the recipe:

1. Use the color picker tool to pick a 3x3 sample of the darkest part of the tongue
2. Switch the foreground and background colors
3. Use the color picker tool to pick a 3x3 sample of the brightest part of the tongue (excluding food)
4. Use the polygonal lasso tool to select the inner boundary of the mouth (tongue and food, but not lips or teeth). Be sure to trace very carefully. Increase the zoom if necessary.
5. Go to Select > Modify > Feather > 1 pixel > click OK
6. Copy the current selection to the clipboard
7. Paste into a new layer
8. Change the new layer to lock transparent pixels
9. Select the gradient tool and set it to radial and to use foreground to background as the gradient pattern
10. Draw a gradient from the center of the mouth to the boundary of the mouth. You may need to experiment here to find something that looks decent. Keep in mind that there is one more gradient to go, so this won't look final no matter what you do.
11. Switch to a reflected gradient type, reverse the gradient and change the gradient style to foreground to transparent.
12. Switch the foreground and background colors (dark should now be the foreground color)
13. Draw a gradient from the center of the mouth to roughly 1cm above the top lip, and make the direction of the gradient perpendicular to the top lip. Again you may need to experiment to find something that looks decent.
14. Go to Filter > Texture > Grain... > 11 Intensity, 52 Contrast, Grain Type: Clumped > click OK
15. Use the brush tool with 14 radius, 100% hardness, 38% opacity and 10% flow to draw around the teeth to create more of a shadow.
16. Flatten the image
17. Use the blur tool with 20 radius, 0% hardness and 100% strength to soften the line between the lip and the tongue. Use this multiple times until the desired softness is achieved.
18. Use the sharpen tool with 38 radius, 0% hardness and 50% strength to sharpen the tongue area. Essentially with this and the grain filter above we are replicating the noise imparted by the image sensor (a tricky task).
19. Save and you're done!

Feel free to experiment with this until you have the desired result. The above steps are just one way to do it. Good luck!

 

[hollerz]

That is amazing!!! Thank you so much for that! I'm gonna mess about with it a bit more but it's looking good already for what I need it for!

Thanks again!

 

[snberk103]

Wow! It may have been a "5 minute Photoshop job" but I'm pretty sure there is a number of years of experience behind that 5 minutes. I'm going to copy your instructions and learn something new. Thanks!

 

[jabbott]

Wow! It may have been a "5 minute Photoshop job" but I'm pretty sure there is a number of years of experience behind that 5 minutes. I'm going to copy your instructions and learn something new. Thanks!

Thanks for all the positive feedback. FWIW, I've been using Photoshop since version 3.0. It's hard to believe it's been over 16 years!