Photoshop advice

[ktlindsay]

Hello,

I took this shot and postprocessed it today. The original (see here: http://ktlindsay.blogspot.com) had stuff in the background I didn't want so I tried to take a copy off part of the wall and use it as a pattern during "fill" - but it didn't work very well. Any ideas? Or indeed any other suggestions?

[peeperita]

this is such a cute concept....very girly indeed....

i took a look at your original and i feel you made good choices on what to remove....i get the feeling that you were unhappy with your cloning and brought in a texture for your wall and baseboard to help blend that in......i do suggest that your bring this texture in more tightly around your pretty stockings.....they are the first thing my eye goes to....then the wall near them.....

peeper

[kimspics]

I think this is a very sweet and feminine ( is that spelled correctly?) shot- what a great poster or enlargement this would make. I love the coloring!!! so simple yet so creative and beautiful a picture!!!!

[FrankenPengie]

I agree the texture needs to fill the wall. Have you tried clone stamping? Those two nail holes could go.

This is *very* alluring. Me likes!

[jiminyClickit]

ktlindsay,

Like Real Estate and retail sales, location, location, location. Valuable ideas/concepts need valuable background. Do another for the near-perfection of an edit-free shot, against a better wall. Post work could save this, but in a retake, you could get the top bow less blown out. Impressive blog, shows this is worth doing several times to get it to be what you want. Ick? Knobblesome? Real.

[Mr. Clipit]

Yep, the difference in texture really jumps out. Theres two problems - the film grain (noise) and the repititon of the same texture on the right. So the solution is thus:
1) Apply a gaussian blur to to the wall, and then to the base (do this seperately so that the lines separating them stay sharp. This makes the repetitive texture less obvious.
2) Add noise to the entire right side, to match the left.
3) Duplicate layer, apply gaussian blur enough to blur the line between left and right. Add mask and fill it with black. Then use a soft white brush at about 15 px and go down the vertical line, so that only it is fully blurred together and blends left and right.
4) This is optional, but you end up with alot of noise, so you might want to use a noise reduction filter to cut down on it. I have noise ninja, so that works better.

You should end up with something like this in about 5 minutes overall.

[geotography]

Tis creative and beautiful; and quite worth the effort for retake.

Very nice composition!

[Nai no Kami]

"L'intelligence est féminine" -Philippe Starck

I preferred to work from the original image (thanks for posting it). Using Lightroom I changed the color balance, brightness, contrast, sharpness, what I perceived as a slight magenta cast and noise reduction. Then I cropped the picture. Then I took the results to Photoshop and obliterated the window and some stains near the floor and blurred the sharp shadows from the legs.

To accomplish this, I drew a rectangle over the top border of the window and used the clone stamp to fill it with nearby similar wall color. I did the same for with the right border (basically, where the window met the end of the crop). By doing this I ended with a window that was detached from the borders of the crop. I then used the patch tool and selected the "now floating" window and patched it using the reminds of the wall. The patch tool adjusts the luminance values, so it gives better results than cloning right away. The problem with the patch tool is that if you try to patch something with high contrast between what's in and out of the patching area, you will end up with some blurred horrible patching. That's why I "isolated" the window from the borders of the picture. I did some more patches to conceal my previously made rectangles. Once the window was gone, I patched other imperfections.

Then I proceded to the legs shadow. For this part, I took advantage of this blurring that the patch tool makes. I selected an area following the shadow, but grabbing a little of the shadow border and a big area of the wall. When patching, the tool would blur the grabbed shadow into the wall area. I repeated the process until satisfied and applied selective blur to conceal imperfections. This is the result.



If you need further explanation, please feel free to ask. You not only can find me here, but my MSN address is public.
Here is another thread of the patch tool + clone stamp in action: Substraction

[ktlindsay]

Thank you so much for your advice everyone!! Really appreciate it - Mr Clipit and Nai no Kami, I am on the case!!!

[Winning Post]

Very nice work ktlindsay. Can't say anything more than the help that Mr.Clipit and Nai no Kami have shown. I personally prefer the former but you were very close in the first place. Just some more post pro practice (which i am also very much in need of)!

Great shot and well done for trying to improve it. Maybe a reshoot to improve what you have gathered here.