I want to use some dated (and originally bad) photographs (e.g. ten years) on my website that shows members of my Special Olympics team receiving awards. The problem is they are positioned in front of a banner that has advertising, which is sometimes not appropriate for the team.
I’d like to remove the banner or cover it up but I’ve not been successful at making it look like I haven’t carved a hole in the photo, removed someone’s nose, or slapped some paint (badly) over the signage. I’ve tried content aware, I’ve used the lasso to mark areas and then paint over them, I’ve blurred and smudged – but the truth is I’m not sure what I’m doing is the right thing.
Ideally, I’d like to lift the people from the photo, paint the sign without having to work around hairdos, and then put the people back – without making it overly obvious that I’ve made adjustments. Thoughts?
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I had to do a load of these recently. The backdrop was nowhere near big enough, but they insisted on using it, I had to select the subjects in 20 odd photographs, and place on a new background. It seemed to me that if you were going to that much trouble, then you might as well use a good background, so I constructed all the sponsor and participating club logos, and made a photo wall.
Unfortunately, I missed a typo, but it's at times like this you learn to really love Smart Objects and CC Librar
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is that the photo you are working from? with that resolution you ability to capture a nice edge of only the people is rough..
There will be many advices on what to do.. like they say "there is more than one road to Rome"
I think that making a mask, zooming in and painting would be a nice way for you to control the masking/extraction of the people.
i would go slow, zoom in and out, and paint in the mask what you want out or in so you have what you need to place them in a solid color background/ paint out the banner with the same color as the wall.
Thats my two cents. 
Considering the image size and quality, any type of salvage job will be daunting and less than totally successful.
The layers panel spells out the method here. In addition, more can be done, such as adding texture to the wall.
1. Duplicate the layer
2. Selection of the area between the blue borders
3. Quick Selection tool and work on the wall in sections
4. Composite of the three wall selections
5. Combined the balance of the wall, filled with a flat color for contrast with the subjects.
I hope this helps you.
One thing that can really help with Layer Masks is to use the Smudge tool and blur tool on the edges of the hair. Choose the smudge tool, select a textured brush, perhaps a sponge brush would work well. Smudge the edhes with light, short brush strokes, preferably with a pen and tablet. Then go over the edge with the blur tool. You can toggle between the layer view and the layer mask view by alt-clicking o the layer mask.
hope this helps
I had to do a load of these recently. The backdrop was nowhere near big enough, but they insisted on using it, I had to select the subjects in 20 odd photographs, and place on a new background. It seemed to me that if you were going to that much trouble, then you might as well use a good background, so I constructed all the sponsor and participating club logos, and made a photo wall.
Unfortunately, I missed a typo, but it's at times like this you learn to really love Smart Objects and CC Libraries. The offending SO was edited from the Library, each PSD file opened, and an action made that meant 'Updated All Modified Objects' could be run from a single 'G' key on my Logitech gaming keyboard. Each instance of the typo was fixed in about two seconds, and re-saved to JPG.
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