This is pretty much a repost since the original thread was lost when the forum database went kaboom.
I have this image here with oof leaves in front of the scene and the bird. Regardless of the quality of the image, I was trying to figure out if it would be possible to remove those, and how. Some parts should be easy to remove using cloning/healing, but those in front of water ripples and in front of the tail/wing of the bird might be harder.
I was wondering what would be the other possible options to remove such objects (other than cloning/healing that is).
Greetings. Sometimes color matching in curves can help.
With a color sampler on the bg (ground) and darker oof foliage, I matched the colors with Lab mode curves applied twice: once for a&b channels (separate curve for each channel) and once for the L channel (You can try and hit all three with one layer or several... doesn't really matter). Painting on mask selects the oof foliage.
The two layers brought the hue of the legs together. Another curves layer - L channel - for the legs did the trick for the legs. The ground had pattern from the foliage, so cloned most of that. (Didn't clone earlier in order to capture the hue differences from the bg and transfered to legs).
This works best the closer the oof object behaves like a color overlay... density patterns kinda mucks it up. In this image the leg pattern dominates the oof object pattern, so it worked pretty well there. For the ground, however, the oof foliage had a pattern that was visible even when color-matched so cloning was the only thing that worked.
In any event, just an extra tool... usually doesn't completely solve the problem.