On the Beach

[chris h]

I've been fiddling with this snap of a tropical English beach but have been struggling with the blurred parts of the foreshore caused by rain on the lens. I've messed about with it but not much success, any ideas. Apart from binning it !

http://www.railway.demon.co.uk/Misc/P1010011.jpg

Thanks

[thomasgeorge]

Chris h., Aside from some precision clone work combined with selecting adjacent areas with the lasso tool , duplicating and dragging over the blurs(use a fairly high feather--5-7 or so) I dont know of much else to do unless you want to go after the whole photo with one of the art or selective blur filters. Its a neat picture regardless. Tom

[DJ Dubovsky]

I second what Tom says. I played around with a layer mask on a high pass layer to sharpen just the blurs but the results were not very good. All I could say that was effective was what Tom suggested.
DJ

[jeaniesa]

Chris, I tried exactly what Tom said earlier this morning. I got pretty good results on the lower blurred areas. I wasn't as happy with the ones above (in the wet sand area) - but didn't spend too much time with it. Perhaps if I did, I could make it work. I can't think of anything else to do. -Jeanie

[chris h]

Thanks for the input one and all, its trickier than it looks but I'll persevere as I like shots that appear near monochrome apart from odd patches of colour. The rainbow in upper centre for instance. It was taken on a foul day with roaring winds and yours truly didn't spot the spray on the lens !

[thomasgeorge]

Chris h, To get a tad of color into a monochrome photo have you tried duplicating the background, desaturating the duplicate layer via the hue /saturation control and using the eraser tool with a soft setting to erase portions of the top desaturated layer to reveal the colored background? It works pretty well and the ones I have done that way for clients have been well received. Tom

[Vikki]

Tom, I'm a bit confused by your instructions for increasing saturation. What I do is similar, but I don't "desaturate". I duplicate the layer, do a Gaussian blur on the top layer, and increase the hue/saturation to the extreme. Then I set the opacity to "color", and adjust the amount of opacity until it looks good. If an area is too saturated, then I would go back and use the eraser to softly remove the saturated areas.

This is a tough one to fix. I'm wondering if you brightened it up, and added more saturation, if it might just take some of the focus off the spots.

[thomasgeorge]

Vikki, Sorry, I didnt make myself very clear, The Purpose fo the technique I described is to do a quick "colorization" of specific areas of a BW photo by using the duplicate desaturated layer as the monochrome "background" and erasing through it to uncover the color in specific areas of the actual background instead of using the usual techniques of adding color to a BW photo. Sometimes (make that most of the time!) I tend to not be too clear in my explinations. Tom

[chris h]

If the image was a customers I'd probably sweat a little over it but its just one of the the first set off my Olympus 3040 digi. I'm very pleased with the results considering I'd bought the camera 10 minutes before , stuck the batteries in and let rip. I love new toys !

http://www.railway.demon.co.uk/Misc/P1010017.jpg

This is taken at 90 degrees red from the other shot, the green colouring of the seats pleased me immensely.

Regards......

[DJ Dubovsky]

I agree with the coloring, it really adds to the mood of the scene. Beautiful shot for just opening the package of a new camera. Usually I get crappy shots and that's with a camera I've used many times.
DJ