Having Problems Changing These Two Objects In Photo

[Scott_11A]

I am still pretty new to Affinity, have been studying the tutorials and have successfully made a number of changes to this photo already. There are still two problems remaining for me and I haven't successfully been able to accomplish them. The first one is the brown rectangular shaped area along the left side of the cat's face. I would like to change it to match the brownish-orange pine needles on the ground outdoors or even to change its color overall. I haven't been able to find a way to do that without losing the cat's whiskers.

That should be easy enough to do using the clone tool but my problem is that I would like to keep the cat's whiskers and the left side of it's head unaffected while changing just the dark brown portion of that area. While I am sure there must be a way to do that, I have been unable to find it. 

The second problem is to completely remove the candle from the lower left corner of the photo. It would seem that this should be simple using the inpainting brush tool if the candle had one solid background such as a sky, ocean, etc. My problem has been that the candle's background has 4 different components, i.e. the sisal post, square base, rug and drape.

It would seem that some combination of the inpainting brush to remove the candle and the clone tool to rebuild the remaining areas should do the job. I have been unable to get that to work however, since some of the area such as the square base and sisal post is somewhat detailed.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how I could accomplish these. Thanks very much.  

[Gnobelix]

Hello @Scott_11A,

I have edited the Image Quick and Dirty.
For better control of the work steps,I proceed as follows.
1. duplicate the image and make a perspective correction.
2. Created a new layer and  removed the candle with the clone tool   and inpainting tool. Make sure that in Settings, Current Layer and Below is activated.
3. Left side of the cat, same procedure as Nr.2 (Created a new layer and .......)
4. Created a new layer for the Cat-whiskers, these are drawn with the Paint Brusch and adjusted with the Gaussian blur.

The final step, merge the edited layers and and sharpen with the high pass filter (Blend Mode Hard Light or Soft Light)

Cheers

 

new_modified_current-1.afphoto

[Scott_11A]

Thank you so much for this. I'm still a long way from being as facile with Affinity as you clearly are!

[Gnobelix]

You're welcome.