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Thread: Awful Background

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    Default Awful Background

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    I am guilty of not checking out the background in the view finder before taking this photograph :confused:. This is the best Green-headed Tanager I photographed while in Brazil. And the BG is full of huge bright spots and odd angles of light. I spent over an hour trying to fade, blur, etc. this BG into something acceptable and could not do it. Any suggestions or is this just an example of what happens when you don't follow an important rule?

    Canon 7D, Canon 400 f4 DO IS, ISO 640, 1/400, f4.5

    C & C very welcome.

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    Nancy, Nice pose and sharpness. I love the colors of this one! The left side seems a bit tight. As far as the BG -How far OOTB do you want to go with this? You could always add a texture overlay or a painted effect on the BG. You could also do some quick cloning and patch work on the BG then a slight blur. I'm sure someone in this forum will come up w/ the right fix.

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    BPN Member Cheryl Slechta's Avatar
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    Nancy, what a beautiful bird! You could always crop from the top to make a pano which would eliminate a lot of the bg and make it easier to fix what's left;)
    "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly" - The Little Prince

    http://tuscawillaphotographycherylslechta.zenfolio.com/

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    Selecting a subject, in this case the Tanager and the limb, is easy or hard depending on the complexity of the its outline. If there is a bunch of feathers sticking straight up, like a raised crest, or something similar, it can be difficult, but in this case it would be relately easy. I would select the bird and limb, use refine edges, and copy to a new layer. Then go to town on the lower layer; usually a considerable guassain blur works well, with a caveate; you will have large halos around the bird. I usually use a large clone brush and, using other parts from the background, paint over the bird and limb, and essentally create a background that was hidden from view, then apply the blur and flatten the image. There are other methods; one that doesn't create halos is applying massive doses of noise reduction to the bottom layer, but you still need to select the subject. There is also a method that doesn't involve selection, but you still will have halo problems with a blurred background, and you will have to remove the subject from the base layer. Dup layer, remove subject from base layer as discussed earlier, apply blur, then erase the areas of the top layer that are not the background. regards~Bill

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    Lifetime Member Michael Gerald-Yamasaki's Avatar
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    Nancy,

    Greetings. Tough background because it has three problems high contrast, high color contrast, and strong linear features. So I applied three adjustment layers tackling each problem in turn: Painted in some green splotches to break up the lines, flattened the contrast with LAB Lightness curve (masked for background), and flattened the color contrast by desaturating (masked for bg). Easy tweaks to back off/add to effects.

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    Some ideas, anyway. Happy to share technique details if you are interested.

    Beautiful colors in the Tanager.

    Cheers,

    -Michael-

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    What a beautiful bird Nancy! I would be very happy to find this in my LCD. :cool: Bill has some really good points and what I use for these situations is Topaz ReMask2. It really makes short work of these sometimes difficult extractions. If it were mine (dang it!) I would select the bird and perch and put one of my generic backgrounds behind it. You do have generic backgrounds don't you? :) This is an idea I discovered one day in the field when the birds weren't cooperating. I set my 400mm wide open, pointed it at some nice foliage, put it way out of focus, and made some "generic backgrounds". I highly recommend it as they come in very handy.
    "It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart, and head." - Henri Cartier Bresson

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    Nancy, I took the liberty of putting in one of my "generic backgrounds" using Topaz ReMask2. If you look too closely, you will see that I only spent 10 minutes on this. :cool: Don't know if your ethics would allow this, but this is what I would have done and simply disclosed the fact when I presented it.

    Michael, I did not see your post until after I did mine as I stepped away from the computer after I started this! You did a great job with the existing bg.
    Last edited by Kerry Perkins; 10-13-2010 at 12:02 AM.
    "It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart, and head." - Henri Cartier Bresson

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    Wow! I'm impressed with both reposts. Michael, I would love the details of your technique. Kerry, I need to make some of those generic backgrounds. No problem with ethics. All depends on your goal. Mine is a lovely image. Does Topaz ReMask 2 prevent sharp edges between the selected bird and new BG so it looks natural? And I do have more space to put behind the tanager since I did crop close to remove more BG. Thank you all for your help and compliments on the tanager. I really was stuck one this one.

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    Nancy, there are several ways you can achieve natural looking edges. The plug-in allows you to choose the "hardness" of the edge and for this one I set it to 50% and that was all I did. You can judge for yourself how well this works and I literally spent ten minutes on this. Also, you can apply the filter to a layer mask instead of the image, which you can then manipulate any way you like, including "refine edge". I did not use that technique as I wanted to show you what you could do with very little investment of time. I just love that bird!
    "It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart, and head." - Henri Cartier Bresson

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    Very pretty bird and all the advice is useful. I have a folder called backgrounds, includes water, greens, clouds etc helps fix a picture.

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    Johan Kruger
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    Nancy, nice sharp capture of an awesome little creature. I see you use the 400f4, can you use it as a walk around lens (size/weight) or do you generally use tri or monopod? Kerry & Michael, im very impressed with your post prod ideas. Kerry does the tool you mentioned let you select the whole background and then you just rip it out ? very impressive stuff. I generally toss photos with busy backgrounds, would love to learn more about these techniques

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    BPN Member Kerry Perkins's Avatar
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    Johan, Remask allows you to extract your subject by painting around the edges of it. The default mode gives you a new layer that has only the feature you want to keep and then you put a new layer under it. You can also use it to create a layer mask if you prefer to use it that way. You can download a free trial version from the Topaz Labs web site. :cool:
    "It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart, and head." - Henri Cartier Bresson

    Please visit me on the web at http://kerryperkinsphotography.com


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    Lifetime Member Michael Gerald-Yamasaki's Avatar
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    Kerry,

    Greetings. I like your repost and thanks for the tips about Topaz Remask. I use and like Topaz Detail 2 and my masking technique is very simple, medium slow, and just okay, so I appreciate the ideas.

    Nancy,

    Here's some of the details on what I did on my repost:

    Start by changing to LAB mode (for step 2, but need to start with it for the whole process) Image->Mode->Lab Color

    Layer 1: Solid Color Fill Layer to break up the lines in the bg. Picked a green consistent with the bg. Since the bg you want to end up with is all blur, starting with a black vector mask on the fill layer, just paint white with a 0% hardness brush. Just tap some color blobs on top of the lines to break them up some. More or less to taste. The color selection panel and mask I ended up are in the image below.

    Layer 2: Flatten the luminance contrast using Lightness curve in Lab Mode curves. See image below. A completely horizontal curve will remove all luminance contrast (leaving only color contrast). Play around with just straight curves (moving just the end points) to see how this effects contrast.

    Layer 3: Simply reduce Saturation to taste.

    By the way, using a horizontal Lightness curve (layer 2) and 0% saturation, removes luminance contrast and color contrast. This leaves you with a solid gray image.

    The masks for layer 2 and 3 are just simple paint with 0% hardness masks for the bird and perch. I alternate between painting white and black till it is good enough.

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    Hope this makes sense.

    Cheers,

    -Michael-

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    Johan Kruger
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    are these Topaz tools standalone products or PS plugins

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    Johan, Topaz is a plug-in, here is a link . The company offers a free trial period so you can download it and give it a try. I have it but haven't used it much-but it does work very well.

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    Michael & Kerry, Thank you so much for the expanded explanations. Michael, I will have to study your directions and practice :).

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