Thank you very much for your help.
I'm self-taught in Photoshop, and am now using CS5. I have been a professional advertising photographer for many years- shooting all formats of film up until about 6 years ago. I also use Lightroom 4. BTW, do you know if content-aware works better in CS6 than in CS5?
I'm fairly proficient with the clone and patch tools as well as content-aware fill functions. But, what I really need to do is to get much better at extracting selecting, and moving elements. I'm not at all adept with the pen tool. With the boat photograph, and in retrospect, as you recommended, I could have done that- cut the boat, retouch the clutter, and then place the boat into the retouched background image. That is a great idea and I will remember it for future reference!
The biggest problems for me w/ the boat image were retaining the fine detail I wanted to keep, such as the wires and masts which ran over the tower in the background. I wound up painting back some of this detail with brush and pencil tools.
The corrected version of this boat photo is fine and I don't want to achieve any more with it than I already have but do want to get faster and better at this sort of correction for similar types of problems.
One other thing: I now realize that the "before" image I posted is not the same as the "after" image which was the one I did retouch. Apologies for that.
I'm happy to have found this forum - it looks like a great place to hangout! Thanks again.
