Advanced Retouching Job

[TommyB]

Hi, All!

Please take a look at the photo in this link:

http://www.pbase.com/tomnan4000/image/38701735/medium

This shot was scanned from a Kodachrome slide taken nearly 25 years ago.

You guessed it! I want to remove the green house from the backround.

My question is what is the most efficient way to do this in PSE3? I'm not really looking for the "easiest" way; just, I guess, what would a Pro do?

Thanks!

Tom

[Wendy]

Tommy,

No idea what a pro would do .. but I would probably use a mixture of:

Crop in in tighter to remove some of the building
Cut and paste from other parts of the image (probably the tree on the far right or the tree in the middle) then use a mask and blend it in
Clone tool ...
Cut and Paste from another image


Wendy

[TommyB]

Wendy:

Using your suggestions and some help from Mr. Kelby's book, I took out the house in the background of the covered bridge photo. I think the results are not bad for a newbie!

Here is the link:

http://www.pbase.com/tomnan4000/image/38900161

I used the technique in chapter 9 of the Kelby book which is about replacing a dull sky. It uses the "paste into selection" fuction.

I found that the hardest part of this was making a precise selection in the target photo. I need to practice this. I had to do it several times until I was satisfied. It took me around two hours to complete all this, after a couple of "false starts!"

My thanks to you and Mr. Kelby!

Tom

[Wendy]

Tom,

You have made a nice job of doing that ... I had kept a copy of the original on my desktop so was able to display them side by side. Much beter to learn by trying things out on your own images .. and you get more satisfaction from it :)

Your restoration is excellent ... the books really was worth its money :)


Wendy

[Mary]

Tom

Congratulations - you did a wonderful job!

I purchased Richard Lynch's book but I think I am going to have to get Scott Kelby's book also.

I really enjoyed being able to see before and after - that was such a good idea - thank you.

[Wendy]

Mary,

I have Richards book for PSE2 and it was a long time before I had enough knowledge to be able to understand parts of it. From Tom' s experience of the Scott Kelby book it does look like a very good buy.


Wendy

[MikeH]

Tom

Congratulations - you did a wonderful job!

I purchased Richard Lynch's book but I think I am going to have to get Scott Kelby's book also.

I really enjoyed being able to see before and after - that was such a good idea - thank you.

Mary,

I have Scott Kelby's book PE3 For Digital Photographers - it is really good. There are a number of practical examples that show you exactly what to do, setting etc. You can also download the photographs he uses in the tutorials so you can go through it step by step and compare your results.

Mike

[TommyB]

Thanks to all for those kind, encouraging comments!

In viewing some of the posts in this forum I hear people talking about "tablets". As I mentioned above, I had some difficulty using the lasso tool to make a precise selection.

Would a tablet (and some sort of stylus, I think) make selections easier? Or would a more precise mouse be better? I use a Logitech cordless optical. Logitech has a new mouse out which is a laser mouse that is supposed to be more precise; I think it is targeted mostly at gamers.

Thanks!

Tom

[Wendy]

Tom,

A lot of it is practise and believe me it does get easier :)

Some tips for using the lasso:

Make sure that you have it set for "Add to Selection" so that you can do it in small sections. Just start off do a small section, join up to where you started then after a short break :) carry on with the selection.

Zoom in very close ... that does make it much easier.

If you have a straight line to do try the curve method ... start with your lasso at point A do a curve below and end up at point B then let Elements draw in the straight line for you.

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pic=1XAmKozt13VibkEmNw4tgwJt32ApXz0


Wendy

[kerriann85]

Nice job Tom!
(I love Kelby's book too.)

[TommyB]

Thanks, kerriann85!

Wendy:

Those lasso tips of yours are excellent! I didn't know about the "add to selection" setting.

Thanks so much!

Tom

[Wendy]

Tom,

I used Elements for ages before finding out that you could add to a selection ... it made life so much easier once I found out about it :)


Wendy

[kerriann85]

I like the ability to make a selection, then use the selection brush to carefully brush in more to the selection or (using alt) brush a little bit of the selection away. I'll have to try using the "add to selection" thing sometime.

[zorz]

Tom,
I'm curious - what exactly did you use to paste? The tree looks very natural - was it a real tree from another photo or a product of 2-hour cloning in pieces?

[TommyB]

Tom,
I'm curious - what exactly did you use to paste? The tree looks very natural - was it a real tree from another photo or a product of 2-hour cloning in pieces?

zorz:

The pasted-in selection was taken from another photo of the bridge; a head-on shot which fortunately included lots of tree and sky. In this shot, the green house was visible through the end of the bridge. The only cloning I did was to blend the new selection into the photo. The tree (the one with the leaves near the center")happened to be the SAME tree in the target photo from a slightly different angle. That made the blending process much easier.

The bare tree off to the right is part of the pasted section.

Tom

[Wendy]

When I go out with my camera I try to take a few shots to use as backgrounds and "fill ins" ... its amazing how often they come in useful. By now I have quite a collection of them :)


Wendy

[TommyB]

Wendy:

That's exactly what Kelby says in his book on the replacing the sky chapter: take several shots of a nice, blue sky with a few clouds to keep on hand for this situation.

No reason why you can't do that with any type of background.

Tom

[TommyB]

For those interested, I made a change in Pbase and the link to the pic above is not valid. Here is the new link:


http://www4.pbase.com/tomnan4000/image/39130634

Tom