Photography Lovers

Here are three different photo's I edited to remove background distractions to make the portrait more appealing to the eyes. In the first photo you can see the little boy playing with bubbles and I edited the image by improving the fence to all be one new look all around as well as removing and covering up that back upside down bench that is in the back corner underneath the corner bush. I simply used the cloning tool to make that big bush cover the entire bench area so it wouldn't show but instead looks like one giant bush. I think the edited photo makes a better look for the overall photo.

The second image the little boy is excited to get a book he won on a name drawing and you can see his is very excited reaching out for the book. The background of the young lady and the other persons leg behind the boy is distrating and takes away from the photo. So I removed both of those subjects to make the image also more appealing and focused just on the little boy. (The top image is the edited one that I removed the background people and below it is the original photo.)

In the third image I took a photo of a military man coming home from the Army to visit his newborn for the very first time. I used a simple white backdrop but later added an American flag as the backdrop to be a more patriotic photo.

Here are the before and after's of each photo I described above: Any thoughts?
I'm still learning Photoshop and some other software editing tools to enhance and edit photo's to make them appear better overall, though sometimes I admitt I do get a little carried away with some of the editing jobs I've done. :D