I am awaiting return of prints to do proper feedback assessment from Assignment 2. My tutors says they are in the mail and that I shouldn't feel constrained to move on to exercises in part four.
In preparation for part four I've been going through Julianne Kost's introductory Photoshop course. It started out fine but halfway through it's starting to drag, which is one reason I've moved on to an exercise. The information is fine, it's just the form of presentation is rather monotonous and I don't feel like I'm doing much, just listening to someone tell me how to use the software. Yes, there are samples for me to work on, but the course isn't built as a tutorial demonstrating how to build one type of image, but as an overview of the software's capabilities. I plan to keep on, but just need to do something else for a while, and this exercise looks manageable and offers a chance for real work in Ps.
What we're supposed to do here is what I've done on many occasions - clean up a photograph. I have a wonderful example from only a couple of weeks ago, a scanned family portrait from the 1970's.
If you bring your attention to my arm and hand, as well as my trousers (that is, the young man on the right), blemishes are visible that were difficult to heal in Lightroom. Likewise, I have a recent example of lens flare that I can't do much about in Lr. I would like to see what I can do with these in Ps.
Results
Loaded the Lr polished jpg into Ps and used the Spot Healing Brush to clean up a bit of the hand, arm and trousers, but wasn't able to do so completely. Switched over the paint brush, sampled color off a nearby area, and painted in the remaining bits for a much better looking image.
The lens flare image has proven more difficult. I have sampled two methods, neither of which, in my inexpert hands, has produced acceptable results. One method is frequency separation, requiring the creation of two layers, one each for color and texture, and modifying the former. The other involves creation of a mask to modify hue/saturation and brightness. Most of the tutorials I have seen involve flares over rather evenly colored/saturated areas, or areas with a narrow range of tones. In my image the range of color over the back of the chair too wide to edit easily.
For anyone who might be interested, here are the tutorials I've tried. (The last one is a blending method that requires application of a field technique.) If you know of any others, please let me know!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf211OKtI-c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjwpqT8TCEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9niGvZClh8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9DggKGiLb8
Perhaps after I spend a little more time playing with Ps and become more facile with the tools it will be a bit easier to accomplish. For now I've spent a couple of hours reviewing and practicing tutorial videos and feel like it's not likely to get much better soon.
Reflection
We are asked to remark on how we regard this level of intervention. I have no ethical qualm with removing dust and other artifacts of technology, including lens flare, though one may have to judge on a case-by-case basis whether any particular image is worth the investment of time required to produce adequate results. A good question to ask may be: Do you want to spend two hours touching up a single image, or would you rather be out shooting?
#
While working on revision to Assignment 2, I found an example of lens flare much easier to work with and include it here. The Clone Stamp tool easily removed lens flare from the light pole, but was less helpful in removing the same from the window. My solution was to replace the window with a copy of the window to the right, slightly altering the “truth” of the image.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment