Re: Assistance with photo editing.

On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:53:53 +0100, "rda" <nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi guys, I have what I think is a good photo save for a hugely distracting
background.

I was wondering if anyone here could offer any tips on how best to edit the
photo in an attempt to improve it.

The subject and myself would be most gratefull for any assistance.

Photo available here
http://mail.fireflyuk.net/users/rossallan/Pictures/IMG_0407.JPG.htm

I'm using Photoshop 7.

Duplicate the layer 2 times. Take one layer, blur it, duplicate it,
transform the duplicate, lock scale and drag from the top right corner
in about 25%. This is to move the blurred bits of the subject (and
her roses) down behind the subject. (You can also clone over those
edges before you blur - cloning the background over the subject. I
should have done this - I didn't and you can see a red glow behind the
roses.) Merge the 2 blurred layers, then use the clone tool to
obscure the edge between the layers - you don't have to be precise
because you will blur the layer again when you are done cloning. You
can fix the red glow behind the roses now if you want by cloning over
it with some of the non-red blurred background.

Top layer use Filter -> Extract and draw a line around from the edge
of the shoulder on the left, over her head, down the right and on top
of the roses. Fill on the subject, extract.

As you can see, I didn't do a very fussy job of extracting the hair.
This is the HARD part of a project like this - deciding how much of
that fly-away hair you want to retain in the "in focus" layer and then
drawing your extract lines carefully to get the hair but not the
background. Here are the results:

http://jcdill.com/misc/IMG_0407-copy.jpg

If you want to use my PSD file, it's at:

http://jcdill.com/misc/IMG_0407.psd

I didn't do this in my extract - but if you copy the background layer
and do another extract and move it to the top, one trick is you can
use the history brush to paint back in missing bits of the extracted
layer. This is one way to re-capture fly-away hairs. This works best
if you do the extract last so that the "history" of the image before
the extract is the prior step.

jc

p.s. It helps if you link to a small file so people can see the
problem (as I have done here with my solution file), and then also
offer a large file if someone wants to help by working on the
original. Linking to a large file only is somewhat rude - it makes
everyone download the huge file just to *see* your photo.

.

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