Removing image content

I'm in no way ideological about my photography.  My approach could best be summed up as making it as simple as possible.  I use Lightroom to make my images presentable, which amounts to changes in exposure, tone, and sharpness.  I often straighten, but rarely crop and almost never use Photoshop to remove elements from an image.  This is partly due to laziness and partly to a philosophical predisposition that finds life amazing enough as it is.  If there is something I don't like in an image, I don't use it.

But recently I found myself popping open Photoshop. 

I posted this image to my Flickr account, and subsequently linked to Facebook groups, before the niggling bits of red behind the bowler got the best of me.  As the image relies so much on those tiny splashes of red, the extra dots were distracting.  And as they are so small, removing them would be quite easy.  That resulted in the image above.  

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