I wonder if I can get suggestions for improving this image. I like it except for the green stem in the upper right. Any ideas?
Need Help with this Image
I wonder if I can get suggestions for improving this image. I like it except for the green stem in the upper right. Any ideas?
Do you mean the upper left or lower right?Originally Posted by Anita Bower
You've got to be kidding!! If you don't want it, I'll take it!!!
Do you mean the more prominent green thing on the main stem? I'd just use Hue-Sat to "bend" the color a little toward red-magenta if that was what I wanted to "remove." But I don't know the selection tools in Elements. You could do it on a layer and then mask it to just reveal that part. But I don't have the feeling that it's a problem area.
Ooops. Yes, I mean the upper left--that green blob that is driving me crazy. I'll try Diane's suggestion.
I think I remember your saying that your editing program doesn't include Content Aware fill, so I used a different approach, Select>Color Range. (Actually, with this image, that's probably a better approach, anyway.) If that's not an option for you, either, let me know and I'll try a Plan B. (Last night, I tried what Diane suggested, changing the hue, but I wasn't happy with the result.)
Once I chose Select>Color Range, I selected what seemed to be an average of the green color with the regular eyedropper tool and a Fuzziness setting of 32 so too much wouldn't be selected. In addition, I invoked Localized Color Clusters so I wasn't picking up the green in the lower right of the frame. To get more of the green in the plant, I used the Add to Sample eyedropper tool. Once I was satisfied with the selection, I used Edit>Fill>Color and chose a reddish purple near the selection. Because the fill color was uniform but the surrounding colors weren't, it stuck out and needed to be blended. For that, the Color blend mode at reduced opacity worked. The touch of green it left seemed good to me.
Close, but flat and with some edge effects. The latter is probably due to working on the JPEG, though. I hope the original is in 16 bits -- you have over 4.000 tonal levels per channel instead of 256.
I had better luck with plain old Hue-Sat, with masking. I masked first using Quick Mask mode, painting in the area I wanted to select with a soft "black" brush. (It shows as a translucent red.)
Then I did a Hue-Sat adjustment layer and tweaked the Hue and Sat a little (forgot to note how much) and it showed less edge effects from the color transitions in the 8 bit JPEG. If you don't have quick mask mode that could be done on a separate layer and the layer masked. Not a very careful tweak, but you get the idea. If you want to lighten or darken the area, use a separate Levels layer. The Lightness slider in Hue-Sat makes a disappointing mess of tonalities.
I did this on the Master channel but just went back and tried it just on the Yellow channel and got a somewhat better result, but won't bother to repost it. You can try it and see if it works for you.
Last edited by Diane Miller; 01-22-2014 at 12:42 PM.
Diane and Dennis: Thank you so much for your suggestions and work on my image. I'm not real happy with your results any more than with my own. But, I'm thinking of going back to the original image, before editing, and trying some of the tricks you've suggested, and then add textures on top. Many, many thanks.!
I love these flowers. I like the texture you selected to complement the colour of the flower. I like the direction that Dennis is headed in. Please post if you do a rework Anita!
People often neglect the good old Paint Brush tool. I use that all the time to tone down things like that. Try a very dark almost black green of the same hue, or if you want to change the color a bit, try a very dark red/magenta color found in the image. Also you can try using the Sponge tool to desaturate it to your liking first or last.
This is a good suggestion and I used it on my re post. Thanks.
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