Removing the distraction from the corner

[Mike]

I am rather ignorant in regards to digital workflow and PP. I am hoping to get some ideas on how to remove the dark area from the upper right corner and blend it into the off-white background. I am thinking that the good news is that area is not in focus due to DOF.

The picture was shot in ARW format. The tools I have to work with are DxO Optics Pro 5.3.3 and Adobe Photoshop CS4. Again, a guess is that I want to use DxO to convert it to JPEG and then use PS to remove the dark area.

Any help on the best technique to use will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

[David Kilpatrick]

This is very easy indeed. You just place the Clone Stamp tool with a suitable radius (try 75, soft edges) in the lower left area of white-ish-ness, click mouse/alt to pickup the spot, move the clone stamp over the top right, and start painting over.

David

[Mike]

Still playing with it but I think I'm making progress. I picked an area to the upper left to clone and tried to make the upper right mirror it. It's a bit tricky watching where the clone sample is comming from as you paint, but seems to be working well. To work out toward the corner, is there a way to mirror the sample? In other words, as I paint right have the sample point go left?

Thanks for the help.

Mike

[01af]

To work out toward the corner, is there a way to mirror the sample?

Yes, there is. Because in Photoshop there is always a way ... or several ways actually.

Rather than using the Clone Stamp, use the Marquee rectangle. Select an area in the upper left corner which is slightly larger than needed to cover the 'hole' in the right corner. Hit Ctrl-J (or Cmd-J on Mac) to copy the selected area to a new layer which is otherwise empty. In the layer palette, select the new layer. In the Image menu, you can now rotate it or flip it horizontally or vertically. Mirror it, then use the Move tool to move the patch to the upper right corner. Finally, use the Eraser tool with a large diameter and zero hardness to trim the edges of the patch.

-- Olaf

[Mike]

I tried both methods and seemed to have the best success with the clone stamp.

It's amazing how much this simple change effects the composition of the picture.
However, I felt a bit limited by the areas of the picture that were usable as the source for the stamp. The color and DOF of the available areas made matching difficult.

I'm wondering if there is a way to take a picture of just the back ground and use it as the source for clone stamp? By angling the background and offsetting the lighting, there would be a great source of color/brightnes and DOF with the same texture, to select samples from to match the area being worked. Ideas?

[Mike]

Next I'm working on the following picture.

The textured blues are harder to work with (match). I've cleaned up the left side.

The right side is going to be a bit tougher because of the shadows.

[bossel]

They're so cute!! And did you teach them about triangles and diagonals That's a real keeper!

[Dusty]

I better not let my kids see this, they want a puppy!

Dusty

[David Kilpatrick]

That's not a *row* of puppies posing, he learned to use the clone stamp!

The clone stamp can copy from one window to another. Just open a background texture shot in one window, click to select a spot to work from, go back to the main photo and start painting in.

Drew Gardner was explaining his method for large complex group shots at Focus on Imaging. He sets up the camera on a tripod in the studio, with a fixed background. He then places his group in shot, and takes as many frames as he wants. Because the camera is locked down, and the background does not change, he can clone precisely between shots to combine the best expressions. It works really well when people are separated but interacting. For one shot, he had three actresses in each day, and put them in different area of the shot. The final shot shows nine soap-stars who could not all come to the shoot together, but they are perfectly comped in - three left three middle three right - and he managed to get some natural looking overlaps and shadows. He works from a distance (e.g. longer than 100mm on full frame) to minimise variations in scale produced by small shifts in subject position.

David

[Mike]

Thank you for the compliment on my PS skills but I cannot take credit. It is actually a row of four puppies posing. The testament to this is the fact that the focus is not sharp on all four. Focus is sharpest on the rightmost who is furthest back. It's the four boys from a litter of 10, the other six being female. I was not able to get the six girls all looking at the same time. The breeders allowed me to set up and take pictures of the pups when they were 5 weeks old. I took pictures of each puppy individually, the four boys and the six girls together. I learned a lot and can't wait to do it again.

I learned that pink fleece makes a terrible background, even for a female Berner (Bernese Mountain Dog). Using Interfit florescent lights was a good idea as strobs are not good for 5 week old puppy eyes; but I should have used a bounce flash in slow mode to takeout some of the shadows caused by the puppies themselves. I also learned that while autofocus is nice, it often times does not focus on what I want it to; shallow DOF and auto focus is not a good mix.