First of all, I very nice photo! I love the color of the side closest to us and I think the detail is done very nicely.

Second, I think you should be able to do what you want to do with the clone tool. I made the following using the cloning tool in about 5 minutes (I'm sure it would look even better if you spent more time on it) I used a size 81 brush with hardness 0 (cause that's what it was already set to), and used the beige part to the right of the flower as the source. Since it's not big enough I just used the part that I had cloned already as the source to fill out the rest of the area. It would be fairly easy to blend the beige a little bit better than I did on the bottom edge of the flower.

http://homunculus.baltiblogs.com/archives/photos/touchup.jpg

Thanks homunculus!!

Wow, that worked so much better than what I did. I don't know why my cloning was so harsh, but I will try to do what you did and see if I can get the same result.

Someone on usefilm also made that same suggestion, and then also gave me some advice about layers that I think is worth checking out. I really like the version they came up with with the lighter background. I think I might have to go with a combination of the blended layer and the cloning.

Tamara, in Photoshop CS I use the "healing brush tool", with a soft brush about the size of the area to correct. It has the advantage, over the clone tool, that after you clone a clean background over the area to correct, it makes sure to match the color and tone of the corrected area with the surrounding background. This way the correction is seamless.

Amazing macro