Moving A Building To A Better Neighborhood With Photoshop CS5

Okay, I really didn't move the building, I moved the neighborhood.  This restaurant is on a short street with another restaurant to the left and a house (turned office building) to the right.  The fence and chair in the lower left belongs to the other restaurant, but the entire house to the right is gone.  It wasn't like you could see it through the trees.  There were no trees blocking view.  The tees that area there now came from the upper right corner of the shot.  The wood shingles up on the third floor were nowhere near as new as they appear to be in today's image.  Just as a little background about this style of building.  At one point, in some US cities, there were regulations about the building only being two stories high.  Here in the northeast, steep roofs were the norm to be able to shed snow during the winters.  The reason for the wood shingles was to be able to call it a part of the roof.  That way the builder could skirt the regulations concerning the number of stories in a building.  Pretty clever, those old Swamp Yankees.  The house actually does date back to the early days of our town and gets its current name from General Israel Putnam, of Revolutionary War fame.  There's no direct connection that I know of, but Putnam did spend the winter of 1778-1779 camped, with his troops, in town.  To find out how the neighborhood was moved, hit the "read more".

This one's kind of easy, maybe even cheesy.  It's like Photoshop 101.  A copy of the image was made (CTRL J) and the Move Tool (V) used to bring slide the image down.  A black Layer Mask was added (hold the ALT key down while selecting the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the  Layers Panel (looks like a front loading washer).  Then the Layer Opacity (above the Layer Panel) was lowered, allowing the lower copy of the image to show through.  With the lower copy selected, areas of the image to remain selected with the Quick Selection Tool (W).  The selected areas were filled with white (if white is the foreground color - Alt/Backspace). 

That took care of most of the fill in.  The process was repeated to fill in the rest of the area.  The trunks of the larger tress were masked out of the replacement areas to give the overall trees some weight.

See, it doesn't have to be hard.  Just a quick copy and move, paint out what you don't want showing and you're done.