Trouble processing with a carpet stain

I was asked to take some family pictures for a co worker in a dark clubhouse. What I didn't notice until I got home was that the carpet was heavily stained and worse, I got a big shadow from a nearby couch. I've been trying to fix this with the patch tool, but I seem to be making it worse. Can anyone give me any advice on this? I'm just sick about this.

Here's what I started with

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

I can't give you an exact answer but I'll tell you what I would attempt. The first thing I would do would be to select the carpet and place it on it's own layer. From there, I would darken it a bit (and this should aid in hiding the stains). If the stains are still overly visible, I would make an attempt at cloning (this may be a little tedious considering the pattern and how it changes due to perspective distortion). As far as the shadow, you can either make an attempt with your dodge tool or IMO, it may be better to combine two exposures on two different layers and mask the shadow with your gradient tool.

In the picture you have place all around the people.
Whith the crop tool you can crop away almost
the whole black spot.

Good luck.

The Patch tool works but you'll have to make sure you're setting the source correctly. You can also use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select a square of carpet, the use the Patch tool to select a clean source. Whatever you do it will be time consuming though.

For the shadow from the sofa you can try the following approach:
Use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select a portion of the carpet from the opposite side of the photo.
Press CTRL + J to promote the selection to its own layer
With the selection active use the Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal tool to get the pattern roughly in the same direction.
Use the Move tool to relocate the select patch to the new location
Now use the Free Transform command to and line up the patch in the new location.
Finally you could use the Opacity slider and blend modes to make sure the patch blends seamlessly.

I'd work on the other problems too...the photo has wide angle distortion; if you look at the cabinets in the background the lines are not vertical. Also, the faces are mostly overexposed and should certainly be corrected.

Chris wrote in post #15751651
I was asked to take some family pictures for a co worker in a dark clubhouse. What I didn't notice until I got home was that the carpet was heavily stained and worse, I got a big shadow from a nearby couch. I've been trying to fix this with the patch tool, but I seem to be making it worse. Can anyone give me any advice on this? I'm just sick about this.

Here's what I started with


Here's my lame attempt to fix it

Thanks you guys. I'll give that a go tonight and see if I can make any headway.