I took this picture of a blues band in at the Portland OR Saturday market some years ago. I reworked in if TS2 using the AI Remid ‘Ancient Slate’ setting. I tried to get rid of that white blob to the right through some masking but wasn’t too successful - any ideas?
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If you darken it as is, it will just become a grey blob. My first thought then, is to add some texture to the white area. Then you could apply various adjustments to de-emphasize it while maintaining a natural look. For example, in the edit below, I added a concrete texture to the white area, copied the mask, and then applied a blur and a curve to the area with the same mask.
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Thanks for taking the time to do this, Scott. I’m new to masking as a tool, and your idea has really helped.
In Affinity Photo I used a tool called a Patch tool. This allow you to draw a selection around an item to be removed and then find another area in the picture to replace the selection. I think other photo programs will have something similar. It works better than a normal cloning tool.
I then used the sponge tool to de-saturate the area which had some red color.
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Very nice alternative.
Photoshop has another alternative called content aware. You select the area you want to replace using the Lasso tool and then hit Shift F5 both at the same time, then click the “ok” button and see what you get. It sometimes takes a couple of attempts to get what you want. I liked that red area because it blends with many of the other red areas of your photo so I wanted to keep that in. The newest version of content aware also allows you to choose what areas of your photo you want Photoshop to use to fill in the selected area. If you just hit the Shift F5 and click the ok button, as I did here, Photoshop fills that area using the surrounding area to build something to fill it in with. 
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Thanks A-W: I will have to try that - it’s really helped keep all the attention on the guitarist.
Great suggestion. I’m not a PS user so will to see what I can do with Affinty or ON1
Nice capture and I liked seeing how the methods the other uses have to fix the white area, very interesting.
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