taking a cage out of a photo

[FirstLight]

And like I said, obviously you'd still have a lot of work to do, but it is work that could be done a lot faster than cloning it all out bit by bit.

[sjlarue]

If it is docile, the best thing to do is to go back and shoot through the fence. Low fstop makes the fence blurry. Another thing you can do to help the is do a photomerge of it where you take one picture and lean to one side a little so that the tiger is moved so that you see what is behind the fence on the first one....then do an auto align and start masking..

An example that took four shots but needed 6. I had to clone some out and it is a little rough in places that don't have anything to do with the train, but it gets the idea across...In my search for an iron horse style train, I came across this one that would have served the purpose if I hadn't found one outside a fence.

Before:


After:


Basically what I did was a photomerge of the files and then deleted the masks...and then created my own masks...I did it that way because photomerge will open and auto align without to many steps. Then pick the best parts of each photo and mask put the rest. It is time consuming but well worth the effort.

Go get em tiger!

Hope this helps

[kencaleno]

.....20/20 hindsight I know, but next time get the lenshood against the fence, and shoot at largest aperture, then you won't see the fence.

[Murtasma]

Perhaps cutting out the people and tiger then doing some healing on the tiger to remove the fence that is over the tiger would work really well. You can then take the cut out and place it into another image of the jungle

[FirstLight]

Ok, I mentioned earlier the Akvis Retoucher program. It has really improved since I last tested it out years ago. It is available as a plug in for PS now, and the performance is MUCH better than before. Even on my old machine it ran really fast. I did find a better result when only doing parts of the fence at a time. Like only do the verticals over the tiger's face, run the plugin, then go back again and select more. This took about 5 runs and 10 minutes. Short of reshooting though, this is the easiest way to get a lot done quickly. After you have run this as many times as you needed, you will need to come back with your clone and healing brush, but would be a lot less time this way.

Just enter Quick mask mode and paint over the lines, that way you can easily see what you are doing. exit quick mask and then run the plugin. It is free for 10 days so you can try it out and see how you like it. I painted over the lines with I think a 3 px soft edge brush.

HTH

[FirstLight]

Image Restoration and Photo Retouching Software - AKVIS Retoucher Oops, here is the link - meant to post that earlier.

[FirstLight]

Ok so obviously you can see I like a challenge - LOL. I just can't walk away! I need help! haha

Ok but seriously, I got to thinking about this more. There is a beauty retouching technique for skin, using high pass filter, gblur and Linear Light layer mode. I started wondering if some variation of this could help here. It won't take the bars out like the Akvis program does (I still think it is your best bet for a fast way to get a lot of it done. No, it's not perfect, but come in with your clone and healing brush and I think you'd get a good result).

Anywho, what I did here was dupe the bg layer, invert, layer mode to Linear Light, run High Pass filter, and I don't recall the radius but if you will play with it I'll tell you what to look for. you will see the dark lines of the bars disappear, although you will see a dark outline of each of them. Apply the filter when you get that look. Add a mask, fill with black, and use a white brush to reveal the High Pass layer just over the center of the bars. You end up with what looks like faded out wires rather than the dark lines you have now, and you still have to use clone and heal and patch to retouch those out, but having the lower contrast helps a lot with this. This little section took about 5 minutes with all the steps involved. You need to use a small brush, on the High Pass layer mask over the lines of the cage. I used a 2px brush, not super soft edges though.

In this crop, so you can see closer up, I have used the patch took through the middle area of the body to take out the lines. Over the ear area there, you can see what it looks like after the high pass layer has been set right and masked. Those are the lines you are left with having to retouch out, but like I said before it makes it a lot easier because you can use the patch and healing brushes rather than just straight cloning. The dark lines of the cage would play havoc on the patch tool or the healing brush, otherwise.

If you are serious about doing this, I do not envy you - a lot of work here! But it was so fun to play with this. I really love a challenge! lol

[Yorketown]

hello thankyou it all sounds a bit confusing for me if any1 wants to take a go at it pls feel free to email me at peaceandquiet@internode.on.net and ill gladly send you the photo and then when its done you can send it back
thanks again
yorketown

[Yorketown]

thank you for all ur help the photos look great much appreciated

[Yorketown]

i just wanted to say a huge thanx to edgardo bayani for kindly taking the cage out of the photo for me you did a GREAT JOB YOUR A LIFE SAVER and thankyou to every1 else who tried for me too your all great
have a great new years i know i will

yorketown