90th Birthday

[Keltic Ice Man]

I'm all for giving up with this picture. It was taken at this ladies 90th Birthday party the other week.

What I want to do is remove her from the background, or make the background less visable because at the moment it looks a mess. I have tried about 20 different things but end up with pics I just don't like. Anyone got any suggestions of what to do with it.

This shot is straight from Raw - so no noise reduction or anything

Thanks

Allan

 

[Boon]

hi allan
this was very quickly done ( as you can see) by just copying the image, blurring one, then erase to bring her back again.. you can always adjust the blur effect.

 

[CT]

Good effort Steve!

Allan there's lots of ways you can tackle this. I created this image with a plain background so she's easy to cut out with the lasso tool or magic wand.

Then I opened you original image, blurred it, lowered the saturation then pasted the figure in from the first image. I then flattened the image and ran the soften tool around the edges of the figure,. Finally gave it a sharpen

I have to do a lot of this stuff for the restoration work I do but it's not something you want to be doing too much of unless you're after a particular effect. Sometimes it's best to just have a good look at the viewfinder before you press the button, and ask people to move.... it can save you a lot of time and hassle.

Changing the background isn't as easy as you might think - the light needs to be of similar quality and coming from the same direction as the subject to be convincing, or it just adds to the 'pasted in' look.

Have a play though using the first image.

 

[Keltic Ice Man]

Steve - Thanks - I'd been trying something similar but the white of her cardigan seemed to spill out with the blur so wasn't too sure about it.

CT - Wow - I have tried and tried to cut out the young lady but her glasses and her hair just had me totally stumped. Can I ask what tool you used to cut her out as its brilliant?

Many thanks both

Allan

 

[CT]

I have tried and tried to cut out the young lady but her glasses and her hair just had me totally stumped. Can I ask what tool you used to cut her out as its brilliant?

Many thanks both

Allan

Well it's not brilliant Allan, it was a bit rushed tbh mate, but these jobs seldom are really brilliant and as photographers these are really last resort measures and best avoided except to get us out of the ess aitch eye tea. Having said that, time spent playing with images and tackling these jobs is money in the bank as far as editing experience and judgement are concerned.

I used the freehand mask tool in PSP to cut out the background in sections till it was all gone... it defaults to whatever background colour you have set in colour palette. Once that's done then it's just a question of clicking on the background with the magic wand mask tool which selects all the plain background. One click should do it. Then invert (reverse)the mask which selects the figure which you can now cut and paste as you wish.

Obviously when you've got her into your new background you'll need to do some blending around the edges of the figure with the soften or blur tools.

Blurring the original image to use as a background results in the underlying figure blurring slightly larger and will be seen as a halo when you paste in your new figure, so before you paste it in you'll need to reduce the size of the underlying figure just using any smear type tool which pushes pixels about - then paste in your new figure. (Hope that makes sense)

 

[Keltic Ice Man]

Thanks CT - I'll try converting those ideas to CS2 and give it a try

Thanks

Allan