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Separating blurred wingtips from background??
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
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Super Moderator
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...
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Super Moderator
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.
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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
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Super Moderator
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.
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BPN Member
[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
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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 ;)
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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.
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Thanks
Will try this too!
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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.
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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
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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?
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BPN Member
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.
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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
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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.
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BPN Member
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 .
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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.