I'm stoked to hear that Jeffrey! I thought about charging for it TBH, but I'm happy to provide value and earn some solid subs like yourself! Much more to come, cheers
This is pretty much exactly what I do as well. Now that we have 'select subject' and 'select sky', the next logical selection adobe needs to include is 'select pavement'! 😁
Good tutorial. May want to use Luminosity blend mode on the curves - if the concrete has a color to it (ie, beige) this will help preserve that. I also create a frequency separation smart object with some of the texture preserved that sits on top of the inverted S-curve so it isn't overly flat. This also expands the technique to cleaning up things like brick walls.
Nice tutorial, thanks. I use a blank retouch layer instead of retouching on the image (except for the patch tool - which has to be used on an image layer), you can heal and clone on a blank layer and then if something doesn't look right you can erase it, or even reduce the opacity.