in some cases will be expected. Again, your job is to produce clean, attractive images. Even beyond that, if you are submitting for royalty-free sales, you will be required to remove logos, license plate numbers, commercial signs – anything that could make reference to an actual company or trademark, person, or identity of any sort. Royalty-free imagery needs to be void of any identifiers or intellectual property.
The two versions that follow of the same photograph illustrate the kinds of markings that need to be removed digitally in order to make a photograph marketable as a royalty-free image. Ninety five percent of this work was done in Photoshop with the pixel cloning tool. The remainder was done by cutting and pasting portions of the shot from one area to another.
The original shot of a small-town scene is shown below; the cleaned-up version follows.
The identity of this small town is preserved by the changes made to this photo. It can be used effectively as a royalty-free photo. There are no uniquely identifying features.
Taking it Further
Here is an exercise that will help you learn how to simplify your images and clean up cluttered backgrounds in-camera. Grab your camera, put on any normal to telephoto-length lens (not wide angle) and head outside. Now choose a subject. Looking through the camera, choose a subject in the foreground. Now shift your gaze to the background of the image, and move a few feet to your right, while watching, through the lens, what happens to the background elements. (Try not to step into the swimming pool or the street!)
Can you see a telephone pole or street sign in the shot? Notice how it’s relationship to the subject changes as you move? If your subject is a person or group of people, moving a couple of feet to the right might move that street sign so that it no longer appears to be growing out of someone’s head.
You can use this same technique to hide license plates, building signs, etc. Perhaps by reorienting yourself, an ugly steel pole can be hidden behind a tree. I use this approach all the time to keep my backgrounds clean. It’s far faster to move a few feet than to spend countless minutes or even hours using Photoshop to later remove unwanted elements.
You can try this exercise with a wide-angle lens, but the degree of coverage is so wide that your background will fill the entire frame. You’ll be overwhelmed with image elements that all seem to converge upon one another. A normal or telephoto lens makes the process easier.
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