anyone have good photoshop knowledge?

lele

Avid Member
maybe Will??? I don't use it much but want to fix a photo.

If I have a blade of grass that is crossing over a petal of a purple flower and want to remove it and replace that part of the petal with its surrounding color how do I achieve this? I have Elements 3.0 and I have Scott Kelby's book, which I think is great(!) but I cannot find how to do this. I just am not sure what to look up in index.

thanks for any help!

lele
 
Hi Lele,

If you are using Adobe Photoshop you'll want to do some toying around and studying up on using the Clone Stamp tool, and the Healing Brush tools. By taking samples from other parts of the image, you can mask over another. It takes a lot of practice and tiral and error. This is a fairly advanced task, especially if you want to keep the image large to be printed, rather than be shrunk down for the interweb.

Be sure to zoom in really close while you are working with these tools, and zoom out to check how it looks.

Create a new blank layer, clone from the original and "paint" onto the layer, so should you mess up, you dont have to restart enitrely.

Hope this helps.
 
Photoshop Madness!

Listen to Will Lele,

"Inventing" things like hidden portions of flower petals is more hard work and experience than "tricks" when using Photoshop. (I worked at a magazine for 11 years as a graphic art coordinator and spent 8 hours a day manipulating images.)

As Will says, work up close (then back off to view occasionally), have a few layers going to try different tools like smudge and airbrush) and work your butt off! :D Practice makes "better" (ain't nobody perfect)

If you have another shot of the flower, you can clone between the 2 pictures, but that can be confusing for a novice.

Don't get discouraged, it's supposed to be FUN! Love to see what you are working on. Let me know how it turns out.

David
 
Yes David is right. If you aren't skilled at this, it's a dead give away that it was altered. It's going to take a lot of practice, and in most cases it's easier to take another photo! Sometimes it's a one time event and thats not possible though.

Just for some fun, I thought I would mention this incident that happened in 2006.

This image below taken by Adnan Hajj was doctored by him, then used in a Reuters article. He denied doctoring the photo at first, even though it is undeniably the most obvious cloning ever. Adnan Hajj is a good photographer, but a toddler could photoshop better than him.

20060805BeirutPhotoshop.jpg


Here is Hajj's original unedited photo:

20060806BeirutPhotoshop09.jpg


Below is an image taken buy Ben Curtis of the same event:

20060805BeirutPhotoshop06.jpg


You can see that the first photo, is a mix of the second two. There are not only repeated buildings that do not exist where they are placed, but the smoke most obviously has blatant repeated patterns.

You can read about the whole ordeal here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5254838.stm on on any number of a million blogs that wrote about it. Read about "all of Adnan Hajj's images had been removed from the company's database." Way to go pal, now you've lost the largest news photo gig ever! If not every other! Maybe you can get a job photo-shopping photos... wait...
 
thanks for all the tips. I have played around with cloning stamped before with a lot of frustration and minimal success. Have had a bit more success with healing brush. There is a local adult ed one day class in Feb. that I am going to sign up for. I've been able to figure out a lot (and Kelby's book is quite helpful, too) but I want a person to get some practical, hands on advice.

Boy that is something about those photos! I will have to read the blog link later. Did he really think he could get away with that? The smoke looks like it came out of a waffle iron! :rolleyes:

Even well doctored photos (like the one LostLake added :p) often show some signs to a "sensitive" eye and I try to steer clear. Here is the photo I want to fix. The striations in the iris petal may make it impossible. It's not that big of a deal, it is just that I want to use the photo as part of a gift for a friend who just lost her husband and that leaf blade (not really grass just said that for easy explanation) is detracting. On the other hand it brings focus to the rain drops which interestingly are only on that one petal and in the center. As you can see, I have not even cropped out my camera loop from it yet :D
2151253270_dbcdfdcc34.jpg
 
If you have a higher resolution image I can try and make it work.
Photoshop is my job, though to be honest that one will be hard because of the reasons you already stated.
 
thanks, that's very nice of you! I'll crop it down to how I want it and make any other adjustments (just a little contrast maybe) and send you a PM to get your email address? That would certainly be easier than just posting a high res. as I am sure we need to take this off the forum at this point. I just called and signed up for that class but it's not until Feb.

thanks!
lele
 
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