Help with sky

[Sharon Brunson]

This picture is going to be enlarged a lot. I am trying to get the sky under control-it is covered in scratches, marks, etc. The overall quality of this picture is pretty good.

I have removed for the most part some writing and marks, but my question to you all is what would you do with this sky? If I select it and soften it too much, it will be too soft for the stark foreground.

This picture is darker on the edges as a jpeg than it is enlarged.

Thanks for any help.

Sharon

PS.This was taken in what is now the panhandle of Oklahoma.

[Sharon Brunson]

Here's the pic

[DJ Dubovsky]

Sharon,
I would say you have 2 options. 1. You can save the sky by trying to get rid of all those scratches and marks or 2. you can replace it all together.

I'm not sure there is a real magic method of cleaning the damage with out alot of pain staking work. Is it worth it? If it were me, I would try to find some sky images close to what you have there and replace it all together and devote my painstaking work to the structure and people.

If you really need to keep the sky you might go to the tutorials in this site and look for Tim Edward's Quick De-crack tutuorial. You can find it here That may do alot to clean up some of the major work involved. There's also a download for an action if you have Photoshop 6 at the top of the tutorial. I tried it and it works very well.
DJ

[Sharon Brunson]

Thanks for the feedback, D.J.

I had downloaded and used the decrack action before and really liked it. But I didn't think about using it in this situation. I tried it and the funny thing is, there were more scratches. I don't know why that is. I like that action for the purpose Tim showed because it doesn't smooth the picture out too much. I hate over correction.

Anyway, I like the action for decracking. It just didn't help here. I'm still thinking about replacing the sky. If I can find a way not to, I'd rather not, but I think that was a good solution and it may be my only one.

Thanks for your help.

Sharon

[PHI]

Sharon,

If other software is an option for you, you might consider WinImages. It's "Remove Feature" operator is absolutely superb at precisely this kind of thing (and a lot other things!)

If you'd like to post a high-res "bit" of the sky, I'd be happy to show you what can be done in just a few seconds - it's just about magical.

I'm a (very new, like one week) software engineer at the very company that makes this software, but am also an expert user of the application itself and a rather devoted fan of its image manipulation tools.

[Mig]

Hi Sharon,

A fairly easy and quick fix in ps that anyone can do is to select the sky with one of the selection tools and copy it to a new layer.
Then go to the Other filters and choose Maximum, and set it to a low level.
Then do it again, but this time choose Minimum from the Other filters, and set it to an evel lower level. (You'll see right away what I'm talking about if you try it.)
Then to gausian blur, set to a low level.
Then "add noise" but only enough so you can't see the noise.
The background is softer but I don't think it takes away from the picture.

There's a filter called Buzzpro for ps that will also do the same thing, but only better. With Buzzpro there's more control and you don't have to use gausian blur.
Mig

[Sharon Brunson]

Walt, I would be interested to see what WinImages can do with this. The best I could do file size wise was here

http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4001084&a=30087282&pw

Just click on the thumbnail.

Thanks for your interest.

Sharon

[Sharon Brunson]

Mig, I'm going to work on your method tomorrow. I'll let you know how I do. I think your rendition was really good, especially considering the small file size I posted.

I have thought about getting Buzz Pro before. I never realized it would work on something like this. I know the demo is limited but I'll try it and see how it goes.

I'll try your first method first.

Thanks a lot,

Sharon

[PHI]

Sharon,

Here's the result. I used the Remove Feature operator with a polygonal area selection to pull the lines and some of the spot noise, then used the Remove Isolated Chunk operator on the whole sky by selecting luma priority for the magic wand and limiting the luma range appropriately. I spent about three minutes on this. Depending on what you consider obtrusive and inappropriate, you might have approached it by pulling out features I didn't, or leaving features I did - remember I don't have the context of the entire image.

The sky's texture remains for the most part, and the annoyances are for the most part gone, at least to my eye.

Please let me know what you think, even if you think it stinks, I'd like to have some feedback about it... I'm going to be doing a lot of the work for digital image processing enhancements for the next version, so your comment will be listend to carefully.

[Sharon Brunson]

Walt,

It looks great, fantastic.

Now to get something comparable in Photoshop. I haven't had a chance to try Mig's suggestion yet. I thought his picture looked great too.

Thanks a lot Walt. I wish I could translate WinImage's terms. I had a little bit of the same problem going from PhotoPaint 9 to Photoshop 6.

Sharon

[Sharon Brunson]

Mig,

I thought your method worked great. I am posting a first draft of the sky. This will give me something I can work with.

I can clean it up, etc. but now I have a slate I can use.

Thanks to you all,

Sharon