Needs a bit of help.

The Ghost Tree is located on wonderful 17 Mile Drive at Pebble Beach, right at the entrance to the viewing area for the Lone Cypress, of which I wrote here.

It’s right on the edge of the Drive, surrounded with clutter. A fence here, the road there and that awful sign.

A few moments with Photoshop CS5, using Content Aware Fill and Lens Blur, plus a bit of messing with Curves to add punch to the poorly lit subject, and the result is transformed. A final touch-up with the clone stamp tool and the out of focus highlights are gone.

Here’s the after and before, in Lightroom 3:

And here’s the final thing:

Ghost Tree. Panasonic G1, kit lens @ 25mm, 1/160, f.8, ISO 320, processed in CS5.

Getting all high falutin’ about image manipulation? You like Adams‘s work? He did much more of this sort of thing in the darkroom.