Removing an obtrusive shadow

[_ck]

Like a rookie, I annoyingly got my big fat head in the way of this photo and it casts a huge shadow over the subject's forearms and legs. Does anyone have any ideas how I can remove it seamlessly? Merely selecting the shadow and trying to colorize the areas does a poor job.

[Daviskw]

Hi there

This will take some time to do right i think. I did this version in a hurry. I copied and masked skin over the arms and have them just a little blurry but that could be fixed. Same with the shirt and I masked some cloth off the net for the pants.

With time and care you can d a much better job

Butch

[bart_hickman]

It's going to be tricky whether you do it with cloning/healing or by using a color transformation. I like to use the color transform method myself so as to preserve all of the information that is in the shadow.

In this case, you just create a curve layer, then mask it out with black, then paint white in a couple of the shadow areas. Now open the curve dialog and start turning up the brightness until the two areas you painted start to get close to the sunlit colors. Then a color balance or photo filter layer might be needed to adjust the color balance in the shadows so they look like they have the warm sun light in them. I actually drop all of these adjustment layers in a group and put the mask on the group. (The jpeg compression clobbers color information in shadows, so I also had to twiddle the shadow colors with an HSL layer and some color blend layers--you might get to skip this step since you get to work with the original which should have reasonable color information preserved in the shadows.)

It's not really worth the trouble to try to get a seamless transition from shadow to sun, so I got it as close as possible and then healed the residual seam. I also healed the thin pieces of shadow on his arm.

Bart

[_ck]

Thanks Bart and Butch for offering your insights. I will give them a try.

[Swampy]

The thin piece of shadow might have been a tatoo?

[_ck]

erm.......

[PhotoFun]

Butch,

Your way is efficient! Can you give more details how you copied and masked the skin ?

Thanks,

[Daviskw]

Hi there

I copied skin from the left arm, shoulder down to the shadow. Then flipped and positioned over the right arm, attached a filled mask then painted in where needed.

For the lower forearms and hands I separated the Luminance channel and matched luminance with curves. Then I sampled skin color from the forearm and painted on a blank layer set to color mode. The only area I had to do a little cloning was where the forearm layer and the copied layers matched. This allowed me to keep the skin detail in the hands.

Butch

[_ck]

Thanks for people's help. I ended up using another photo and compositing the two using a series of selections and erasing, then retouched it. Any comments are welcome.

[Daviskw]

Good work ck... I like that type of coloring

Butch

[Angel_Ice]

Great work here!

Bart, can u explain better your way?

Ck, great result, can u do a tutorial about this? it's fantastic!

[_ck]

Angel,
Thanks for the praise! I retouched the image after studying a number of different tutorials and posts already on this site. Is there anything in particular about this image you want to know? The colours are a result of dodging and burning to provide depth and a 'silvery' glow, followed by a desaturation of the whole image, and particularly of blues and greens, then re-saturating the reds.

Anything specific you'd like to know, I'd be happy to answer.
CK

[_ck]

Butch,
Thanks also for the compliment, and for explaining your method in detail. It will be something I will find very useful in the future.
CK

[bart_hickman]

Originally Posted by Angel_Ice

Great work here!

Bart, can u explain better your way?

I think my way is the same as Butch's. I attached a snapshot of Photoshop when it's part-way done. I've put a curve layer (curves 1) and a raster layer (layer 2--color blend mode) into a group. The group starts out with a black mask, but I paint white in areas that have shadow--start with a rough painting. Then I boost the RGB curve (shown) until the brightness of the shade area starts looking close to the sunlit section. Then I either adjust the individual color curves and/or paint replacement colors on the color blend layer to fix the colors and then do some final tweaking on the RGB curve until it matches. In situations where the shadow isn't quite so deep and the jpeg artifacts aren't so severe, I'll usually use a color balance or HSL layer to re-balance the shadow colors. This might be a better way to go if your original has good detail in the shadow.

After that, more carefully brush the group mask to minimize the boundary and then do some healing to remove any remaining discontinuities.

Bart