Remove Mold on Beach Chair

[ylwdog]

I shot this last week. It is probably a local's chair that is a permanent fixture. I like the composition and feel of the overcast stormy day, muted colors... but the mold on the chair is throwing off the peaceful feeling.

Wondering how to remove the mold and maintain the continuous color throughout the stripes in the chair's fabric, and hopefully not have to achieve the selection through selecting all the mold spots individually.

I have used color selection on a limited basis, but was not successful here separating the mold from the other background images.

Thanks for the help,

Doug

[Sweetlight]

Doug, First of all I like the shot a lot. I love letting water move through my images it gives such pretty tones and colors. To me that chair gives a perfect oppurtunitty to change the stripes to any colors you want and painting in and over with new stripes would eliminate your mold issue. What is nice about it is the lines are pretty straight and are going to be easy to transform. The other nice part about the image is you can keep the chair nice muted tones as is and as is all the other elements of the image OR you could paint the chair with some bright tones with a lot of punch which would play well against the muted background.
c

[ylwdog]

Thanks for the compliment on the image, I enjoyed making it. I would be interested in seeing what different stripes, done well, could do. However my main objective is to fix the mold.
I would appreciate if the members here on the board could recommend a method that would help me eliminate the mold while maintaining the integrity of the fabric and colors.

Thanks,

Doug

[garibaldi]

tedious amounts of cloning and patching.

[aartist]

I would suggest, select chair's white strips only and then increase brightness/reduce contrast then do some final cloning to further reduce dark spotting in problem areas.

[chillin]

Take the green channel, inverse, remove white to create a mask for a transparent layer above the original, select the blue stripes (feather 1), paint them blue (take a sample), inverse selection, contract 1 pix, paint light (take a sample), duplicate the painted layer x2.

[aartist]

I like that blinking, chillin!

[htown]

I found that rebuilding the stripes was easier than cloning. Could use a little more noise but at this res it's OK.

[MiningArt]

I used the aartist method on the white strips, the Sweetlight method on the blue strips and the chillin blink.

[lurch]

All examples so far, while doing an excellent job on the fabric chair back, have ignored the chair seat and that part of the chair back wrapped around the frame. Result is a pristine chair back and grubby other parts - stands out like a sore thumb. Perhaps those other parts are an exercise left for OP?

[MiningArt]

Perhaps those other parts are an exercise left for OP? I think the OP is looking for techniques and not a finished retouch.

Personally, I would leave the chair as is and add some more real life grubby elements, an old fishing net, a few broken shells, a beer can in the sand, drift wood and etc.. It would add a lot of emotion into the image and contrast of setting.

[aartist]

Wonderful! Love that Blink!!!

[ylwdog]

garibaldi:
I wanted to comment about your work. I am new student photographer and always on the outlook for work that inspires and moves me, yours is beautiful. I would like to see it bigger than is on your site gallery.

Doug

[garibaldi]

Thank you very much for the compliment. Actually, you will be able to within the next week or so, I have a completely new site Im about to launch with a ton of new content, completely new interface and layout, and the images show up BIG, like you can go full screen big. Im actually having trouble keeping file sizes down enough to hold detail and still have it load with decent speed, but thats besides the point. So Ill post it up when it launches, I have been needing to update my old site for a very long time.

[ylwdog]

Thanks for everyone's assistance and advice. I have yet to start on this as I wanted to wait until I could spend the proper time using the methods suggested. I will post back w/ the outcome(s).

Best regards,

Doug

[Swanvio1]

Hi I’m a newby, so hope I’m doing this right!

I wanted to reduce the amount of mould visible to stop it being a distraction to the image but not completely remove it and have a perfect chair.
I selected the white stripes then painted over the mould patch with a low opacity brush, then reversed the selection and did the same with the blue. Process took about 1 min, but as I say it’s not perfect.

It’s a lovely image Doug, I look forward to seeing your “fixed” version.

[ylwdog]

Originally Posted by chillin

Take the green channel, inverse, remove white to create a mask for a transparent layer above the original, select the blue stripes (feather 1), paint them blue (take a sample), inverse selection, contract 1 pix, paint light (take a sample), duplicate the painted layer x2.

Chillin,
I will need some clarification please. Selecting the green channel is as far as I got. You instruct to "inverse", and I do not know what you are referring to nor how to accomplish this task. Can you provide further instructions regarding this one step please?

Thanks,

Doug

[garibaldi]

Hes either talking about one of two things, how he puts his underwear on in the morning, or using the channels to make the selection and build your mask from. You can load a selection from any of the channels and then select inverse to flop it, then paint away areas to build yourself a mask to be able to drop a color onto and then have it apply only to the area you want. Its basically a refined way of masking it by hand with either the pen or brush tool thats all

[ylwdog]

G: I'm glad you guys have a sense of humor here... but I hope it is the latter of the two.
I will give that a shot, but my working knowledge on channels and masking is non-existent. All my selections are done w/ the basic pallet tools, wand, lasso.

Thanks-

Doug

[Quantum3]

good pic. I think it needs more dramatism (and some color adjustments, etc). I'm too exhausted right now for a proper comemnt.

have a good day!

Mart