Beginner Using the median filter in photoshop

[Dannyj1984]

Hi, just wondering if anyone uses the median filter in photoshop to remove creases on backgrounds?

I have a cheap muslin cloth background that is10ft x 20ft and impossible to keep uncreased! When using it for portraits I try and get as much distance as possible between the people and the background but this weekend was in a situation with not much space so had to have the subjects very close to the background. So I can't remember where I read it but I remember watching something where the person selected the background and used the median noise filter to smooth out the creases like this,

Pip6 by danny jebb, on Flickr

I have googled it and can't find a single mention other than using it to help clean up dirty white backgrounds.

Danny

 

[juggler]

Not perfect but worth a try: https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/another-try.602251/#post-7043295

 

[Denyerec]

The median can look a bit synthetic if you have any kind of noise/grain in your base image, as then it won't match, so be careful with that.

Video here:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn7KcpHpAlE

 

[CraigDHD]

The problem with using median for background is it averages all the colours so you get a lot of bleed from the subject, in this image it can work but to do it duplicate the layer then use content aware to remove the girl, you can then smooth the background with median and mask the girl back in fairly easily.

If you're doing this you're probably best to add a bit of noise after doing the median blur so that it's not quite so artificial looking. You'd probably struggle to use it as technique effectively if you don't have as much background in the shot.