How can I extend the wood floor in this image?

Question

I'm a bit new to Photoshop. This is the picture I'm working with: https://ibb.co/Dt9VvRr

I want to extend the bottom to make a more square image. This means extending the wooden-board floor downwards, but I'm not sure what's the best way to do this. So far I've tried clone-stamping and pattern-stamping. Clone-stamping looked more natural, but this is what I get: https://ibb.co/DrFH8qg (I sampled mostly from the wood boards on the left under the platform).

What else should I try? What would a pro do? Thanks!

Answer 1

Sometimes.. the best option is to think "composite" rather than editing what's there.

Regardless of skill level and the ability of some tools, there are times where the area one needs to match is just so small the effort it takes to replicate that small area across a much, much, larger area is just unreasonable.

In my opinion, this is one such case. You aren't going to be able to effectively clone or duplicate a tiny area to be 10-30 times it's size. Seams and repetition are going to be abundantly clear and the amount of work to overcome those issues can be ridiculous.

So, think "composite" instead. Find a completely different image of a wood floor and composite that image into your existing image. In other words, replace the floor aspect entirely, don't try and work with the existing pixels. If one composites a new image, then there's only one seam or one area of integration which needs to be addressed. In this case, the top edge.

It can be much easier to alter tones, hues, shadows in a composite than correct a billion bad cloning/content aware seams.

Just a cursory search for "wooden ship's deck" turns up some possible composite solutions:
_{Note: I searched for "ship's deck" because there's a greater possibility it will more closely match the existing image in that it'll have a greater chance of being worn and weathered. Whereas "wood floor" will almost always be clean and smooth.}

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/wooden-road-and-sunlight-gm486439989-37334968

^{This specific image may not be best to use. it's merely provided as a quick example.}

Even if you can only get so close with image searching, it's easier to alter the perspective of a larger image to more closely match the original.

I'm not trying to imply the work will be minimal with a composite. Not by any means. But it will be cut considerably by just finding a better suited image to cover the area you need to fill. Matching tones/shadows and fixing a single seam will take much less time and effort.

Answer 2

The next floor extension is a piece of yellowish synthetic wood-like floor material. The image is taken from an advertisement.

It got very heavy stretching in Photoshop (Edit > Transform > Distort) and an adjustment layer which darkens and hue-shifts the advertisement layer (the next layer only switch is ON) towards the colors of the background items. I guess you cannot find an ad of as detoriated floor as seen in your original, so you probably do better by extending a better quality floor to cover the original fully.

The joint of the original floor and the background items is covered by smoke and darkness. It's made to hide the not so continuous perspective, I guess. You must use the same trick. You must paint some smoke to a new layer and insert a masked adjustment layer (for ex. Curves) to make the dark zones.

This old case can be useful if you want to try to make a bigger surface by tiling smaller pieces in 2D How to create a wooden slat pattern in GIMP?

The tiled surface in the linked example is seen straight on the face, but images of planar surfaces can be distorted to another view in Photoshop as shown above. To make good quality distortion you need a high resolution image, preferably bigger (in pixels) than your original image. A 500x300 pixels screenshot is useless.

If you want as detoriated floor as the original you probably must tile it in a 3D program.It's not especially difficult to make at first perfect tiling and then move planks here and there. But that's true only if one already knows how to create 3D models.

Getting right looking (=photorealistic) materials, light and perspective needs advanced 3D software like Blender, Maya etc... It doesn't happen with Illustrator's 3D effects nor in entry level 3D modelling programs. Further details are out of the scope of this answer.