Hi folks, it's me again.
I've been spending some time recently scanning in a few old slides and negs, and trying to clean them up a bit. One of the ones I came across (these are about 20 years old) was a grabbed shot of a dog in Kos having a stretch. I quite like the pose of the dog, but - wouldn't you know it? - there's an annoying branch spoiling the picture.
The full image (scaled down a bit) is here.
Now, I've been steering clear of major retouching so far: lack of confidence, mainly, but I thought, "OK, let's have a go at getting rid of it". It took me a while, but here are the results (I've cropped it to the relevant area, so I could make it larger):
Before
After
The technique I used was:
1. Duplicate the background layer.
2. Remove the branch using clone brush (lots of short clones needed), but over do it slightly, because I find that, no matter how soft the brush, you end up with visible lines.
3. Add a "hide all" mask and then paint with a soft white brush over the branch to put the cloning back.
4. A quick Gaussian blur on the mask to blend the edges.
Oh, and I found that (on the dog's leg) another helpful thing to do was to do a 100% opacity clone from a (nearly) matching area, then go over it with a 50% opacity clone from somewhere else. This helps to reduce obvious boundaries and lightness mismatches.
All in all, I'm quite pleased with the result. Could it be improved? Is there a better technique that I'm missing (I admit that I haven't searched the forums due to lack of time).
I've been spending some time recently scanning in a few old slides and negs, and trying to clean them up a bit. One of the ones I came across (these are about 20 years old) was a grabbed shot of a dog in Kos having a stretch. I quite like the pose of the dog, but - wouldn't you know it? - there's an annoying branch spoiling the picture.
The full image (scaled down a bit) is here.
Now, I've been steering clear of major retouching so far: lack of confidence, mainly, but I thought, "OK, let's have a go at getting rid of it". It took me a while, but here are the results (I've cropped it to the relevant area, so I could make it larger):
Before
After
The technique I used was:
1. Duplicate the background layer.
2. Remove the branch using clone brush (lots of short clones needed), but over do it slightly, because I find that, no matter how soft the brush, you end up with visible lines.
3. Add a "hide all" mask and then paint with a soft white brush over the branch to put the cloning back.
4. A quick Gaussian blur on the mask to blend the edges.
Oh, and I found that (on the dog's leg) another helpful thing to do was to do a 100% opacity clone from a (nearly) matching area, then go over it with a 50% opacity clone from somewhere else. This helps to reduce obvious boundaries and lightness mismatches.
All in all, I'm quite pleased with the result. Could it be improved? Is there a better technique that I'm missing (I admit that I haven't searched the forums due to lack of time).
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