johnrochaphoto.net

Archive for the ‘Digital Imaging Tutorial’ Category

Oops! I thought I’d arranged for this post to go out in the middle of my holiday! It didn’t. Still, don’t worry, Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

In my last post I emphasized how important it is that people in a stock photograph should be either:

Not be recognizable
or
Have signed a model release.

The reason, as I said, is that photographs with recognizable people in them cannot be used for commercial purposes such as advertising.

In my photo “a stroll through the park” we removed the two men strolling by using a rub out and replace technique.

Now we are still left with the man sitting on the bench, It’s clear from the blow up that he is recognizable.

We have a number of options:

We can crop the picture to exclude the recognizable figure – this will not work in every case and will always alter the composition and reduce the picture area.

We can use copy and clone techniques to eliminate the figure altogether – this needs some skill and will, of course, alter the composition and content of the picture.

We can replace the recognizable figure with information which will be acceptable from the legal/commercial point of view.

The key to this approach is to have a collection of faces and figures which can be used legally.

One source is pictures of friends, family and other model released pictures – we can shoot a whole variety of these especially for this purpose.

Another source is royalty free pictures with the appropriate rights. These are widely available and need not be large or high resolution.

For this image I have used a royalty free image obtained from the disc provided with Steve Caplin’s must read book “How to Cheat at Photoshop”.

The final, corrected image, depends on two procedures:

First – replace the original head with an appropriate model released/licenced head.

Next – as a finishing touch, select appropriate items of clothing and change important features such as shape or colour. Here I have selected the blue clothes and changed them to green.

The final image is no longer recognizable as the original figure, but the basic information and composition of the picture is preserved.

This is a post in haste as I’m off for a family holiday. See you when I’m back.

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I’m not a wedding photographer. I say that because I’ve recently been chatting to a wedding photographer and I’ve been asked to be Best Man at a wedding next week. That’s why I’m a bit late in posting. It’ll be interesting to see the local lads at work too.

Anyway back to rubbing people out. We had two layers so let’s go and choose the upper layer.

We’re going to use a destructive method for this on the upper layer using the Eraser Tool.

Choose a soft round brush and rub out the people you don’t like! The result should be something like this.

Now we’ll go down and choose the background layer.

We’re going to make a selection here that will cover the same area and a bit more. There are several ways of doing this but for the moment let’s try the rectangular marquee.

and make a section covering the area we want to replace.

Then we can copy and paste this selection above the bottom layer so it looks like this:

Now we can go up and select the top layer again.

Our pasted selection will show through under the top layer but because we didn’t use a tripod it will clearly be misaligned and won’t match up properly:

so we’ll have to move the selection about a bit. For this we must choose our pasted selection and use the move tool to position it correctly.

If we carefully move the selection about we might get the correct result straight away like this. And then we’ll have successfully rubbed out the people we don’t like.

Exactly how easy this is depends on how accurately aligned the two original images were.

It really is better to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by digital imaging by thinking ahead and preparing in advance.

Of course we’re still left with the person sitting on the bench – but that’s a story for another time.

If I survive the wedding, I’ll be back soon.

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Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing, China

This is just to show how I managed to wait long enough to get a clear view of the wall. But I had to crop it fairly tightly still.

OK, let’s get down to eliminating people we don’t like.

Let’s get back to a Stroll in the Park.

two variations of a digital photograph a “Stroll in the Park”

One of the great things about digital imaging is that there are so many new approaches to solving problems and if one doesn’t work you can try another.

As I said in my last post, you often can’t wait until there are no people in your picture. So here’s another approach:

Take a series of pictures which are basically the same except that the people have moved on.

(There’s a ‘right’ way of doing this which is to put the camera on a solid tripod, set manual exposure, and use a cable or remote release to trigger the shutter. This will ensure that all the main elements of your scene are accurately aligned.)

In this case I took the pictures handheld.

The idea is to replace elements from one picture with some from the other until you have the perfect composite.

This will need some computer manipulation and just to emphasize that any programme with layers will do I’m going to use my Photoshop Elements version 2.

First of all, I’ll have to open both the pictures.

When I’ve opened them I’ll want to see them both together on the screen and so I’ll choose the tile option.

Then I’ll choose the move icon so that I can copy one picture over the other.

If I drag the move tool with my mouse over the second picture while holding down the SHIFT key, the pictures should align perfectly on two separate layers.

The cursor changes to show I’ve copied the image and can release the SHIFT key.

Voila! I now have my two pictures on two separate layers.

Now I have the pictures in position and I’m ready to get on with recreating the single composite.

One way of doing this will be in the next post.

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