Separating blurred wingtips from background??

[shane shacaluga]

Does anyone have an effective way of separating blurred wingtips from the background?

I find that if i select around the wingtips, its impossible to tone down the background without it being very noticeable around the wingtips as part of the background colour shows through the feathers

I have a couple I would like to process but I always get stuck at this point and not sure how to deal with it

Thanks

[Daniel Cadieux]

Can you post an example of what you are facing?

Without seeing what you mean you may want to use a quick mask and with a soft edge to make the masking seamless at the blurred feather edges...

[shane shacaluga]

Hi Daniel

A couple of examples i just pulled out my facebook account

The problem is that as there is background colour within the blur of the feather tips, in the case I need to tone down the background, I get a really obvious line around the birds layer

I have tried feathering the edges but just get a smudged look which i dont like

Any other suggestions that may work for this?

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[Daniel Cadieux]

For the top photo if you just want to bring down the blue you get get away with desaturating the blue channel on the whole image without affecting the subject (except in a positive way for the blue cast on the blacks). The bottom picture looks fine I would not touch the background on that one.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks

I was using them as an example. Say the background behind the blackbird was really bright, some of that brightness would be appearing through the blurred tips

My question is how to manage those situations?

I will try to finish processing a pic of an egret taking off that I am having issues with. Will post it later on this evening

Thanks for your help

[Daniel Cadieux]

I guess every image will have to be dealt with individually as far as process goes. The first image is a good example though of just desaturating the colour channel on the whole image if that colour channel is not present on the subject (e.g. red bird on green BG or black bird on yellow BG). You can experiment with the burn tool too...you can set it to burn only highlights (use a low exposure %) without affecting midtones and shadows.

[Don Lacy]

[QUOTE]I was using them as an example. Say the background behind the blackbird was really bright, some of that brightness would be appearing through the blurred tips
/QUOTE]
Their are two methods I think would work here the easy way would be to use a brightness or curves layer with a mask and to paint out the affect with a soft brush on the wing tips the more complicated method would be a luminosity mask but for what you are describing a simple layer mask would do. If you do not know how to use layers and masks let me know and I will walk you through it

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks Don

My use of masks is limited to the quick select tool really and then copying to a new layer

Not sure how paint on a mask or how to use the soft brush to remove the effect on the wingtips

Any info you can provide would be much appreciated

Thanks ;)

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Shane, an additional method that may work if colors of BG and bird are sufficiently different (like in the blackbird example) is to use color range selection. You'll find it it under the Select dropdown menu. You can use an eyedropper tool to sample the color to select and then move a slider to set the sensitivity of the selection. You need to experiment a bit to find the right settings. I've used it succesfully to select a sunset sky that I wanted to tone down against a complex horizon with loads of plants sticking out.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks

Will try this too!

[Jerry van Dijk]

Hi Shane, I was curious whether my advice held up with your sample images. Here's the blackbird with the BG toned down one stop, using the color range selection option with the fuzziness set to 120. There are some artifacts showing up because of the low quality jpeg, but this should work fine with the original image.

I also tried another option I sometimes use, the magic wand selection tool. When you play around with the tolerance, it can be a very precise selection tool. For the sparrow image, I set the sensitivity to 10%. Had to click around in the BG quite a lot, because of the different color shades present, but finally had the bird isolated from the BG. Did some refining of the selection edge (smoothing and feathering) and toned down the BG with half a stop. A whole stop created halos around the bird (they are already showing up a little here at half a stop, but that's a matter of fine tuning the edge probably).

I think in most cases, toning down the BG a whole stop is overdoing it. The bird wil look conspicuously bright then.

[shane shacaluga]

Thanks Jerry.

The RP's look better. Need to play around a bit and see how i get on.

Will let you know if i come across any more hurdles

[Don Lacy]

Hi Shane, Here is the results using a curve adjustment and layer mask I went really dark on the BG to create a lot of contrast to make it even harder normally I would not do this as it pulled alot of noise into the image but here it makes it easier to get an ideal of the effectiveness of using a layer mask. I will walk you trough the process in the next two panes. Also this took me about 5 minutes to do if that.

[Don Lacy]

To use a layer mask go to layers > new adjustment layer > curves go to the curves dialog box and pull the mid point of the curve down until the BG is dark enough for you while this will darken the whole image only pay attention to the BG and when it is were you want it stop. Since you open this adjustment as an adjustment layer the mask is already active and filled with white which applies the adjustment to the whole image since we want to only apply it to the BG we are going to paint out the subject with a soft edge brush and the color black on the mask. To do this go to the color picker tool and make sure the top box is black if it is white just hit the arrow above the two boxes and it will swap out the colors once you have black selected your now going to go to the brush tool and select the brush after selecting the brush go to the brush drop down menu set hardness to 0 and adjust the brush size to paint in the body of your subject being careful to stay with in the subject once you have most of the body painted in adjust the brush to smaller sizes to do the head, wings, wing tips. Aways use a smaller brush then the area you are painting in and you will get a nice seamless blend. Now if you do mess up you can switch the color back to white and paint over your mistake switch back to black and redo it since it is on a layer and a mask no adjustment are permanent and you can discard the layer at anytime and your image will not be affected. Here is a screen shot showing where to find the tools needed and the mask it's a little hard to see but if you look at the mask you can see the black outline of the subject indicating that the adjustment was not applied on it.

[Don Lacy]

Here is a screen shot of the Brush drop down menu

[shane shacaluga]

Thank you very much. The part about painting on the adjustment layer was where i was missing out.

I suppose this works for all adjustment layers correct?

[Don Lacy]

Yes I will often have 5- 10 layers all with mask to apply local adjustments only and the best part after I save an image I can always change my mind and delete or add layers without having to reprocess the whole image. Using adjustment layers and mask gives you complete control over your image and are non destructive.

[shane shacaluga]

A final question, is it possible to do the same for noise reduction and/or sharpening?

would be great to paint in the NR on background areas etc

thanks

[Diane Miller]

Definitely, but there you will have a duplicate pixel layer on which you did the NR or sharpening, and then you add a mask (icon third from left at bottom left of Layers panel) and brush appropriately.

[Don Lacy]

Diane is right I never apply NR or sharpening globally at any stage of my work flow always use layers and mask this also goes for all my Nik filters and Photo kit filters .

[Diane Miller]

Another answer for the original question -- Topaz ReMask can do an amazing job of making a feathered cutout / mask for translucent areas. Using it isn't exactly intuitive from the interface but it's quite easy and simple once you know how, and they have a good tutorial online. But as pointed out above, you can only go so far in changing a BG without it looking strange.