background work

[dizzy]

Hi all. My niece asked me to do some shots for her and as she didn't want to leave her garden there was just no decent backdrop at all. As a result, there's a poor quality brick wall behind and some distracting areas (where the roof slopes to reveal sky and some light wall coating). I've got CS2 and would really appreciate it if someone would give me some tips on how to either blur out the background effectively or improve the background; I know you can't polish a turd...

I've tried just using the cloning tool to bring the bricks across, but it doesn't look great.

Many thanks in advance

 

[hypnotic]

It may help to show us an example

 

[..MD..]

would it be poss to see the pic that way alot of people might have more idea of what you could do...?

just a thought


lol what he said

 

[dizzy]

how's that?

 

[Janice]

is that any better.........you can always blur the background more.

i just used a new layer.... added a gaussian blur then a mask and painted the girl back in with the foreground colour set to black. if you paint out too much you set the foreground colour to white and go back over it to paint the blur back in.

 

[mobilevirgin]

I see Janice beat me to it - but I'd done the work by then anyway

Using pen tool make a path around subject and convert to selection. Invert.
Open channels pallette and chose Save selection. Give the selection a name and hit ok. Then add lens blur - make sure preview is ticked and that your source is the new channel. I added a bit of noise too. Et voila

 

[dizzy]

Many thanks!! How did you change the brickwork, Janice?

 

[Janice]

Change? do you mean getting rid of the top edges?

I just used the clone tool and took brickwork from elsewhere and painted it into the corners and anywhere else I didnt happen to like it!

 

[dizzy]

Change? do you mean getting rid of the top edges?

I just used the clone tool and took brickwork from elsewhere and painted it into the corners and anywhere else I didnt happen to like it!

Thanks! What size brush did you use to paint it in?

 

[Janice]

Thanks! What size brush did you use to paint it in?

i have no idea! i just used the square bracket keys on the keyboard to change the size till it looked right to do...pretty biggish to cover a few bricks at a time.