taking a cage out of a photo

[Yorketown]

hello i need help to work out hot to get a cage out of a photo of a tiger at the zoo ive tried clone stamping it but cant get it to work any other step by step help i could get would be great ???

[elkidogz]

I used healing instead of cloning with some success. want to share the pic?

[garrettth]

yea... et us see the pic and mabye we can have some better ideas

[J. r. Weems]

The best way, is to get right in with them.

[Yorketown]

hi thank you for your replies below is the picture i hope someone can help me

[Yorketown]

i have posted the picture below hope it helps and you can help me thanx

[Yorketown]

i have posted the picture below hope it helps and you can help me thanx p.s. how do you heal a picture

[Jim Poor]

While it can be done, it will be very very difficult.

Since you are working from a scan, you don't really have much resolution to play with and the cage is very close to the subject so it is in sharp focus. Then, the wires are so close together that you don't have much room to work.

There may be more hope with the new healing tool in CS5, but that's not released yet.

[Murtasma]

Yep I agree with Jim this would take hours and hours of tedious work with the clone tool. You will need to select a sample point right next to the wire then carefully clone over the wire. Once you have the wire out I would go back with the healing too to help blend the cloning in since where the fence used to be just won't look quiet right yet.

This would literally take me hours and hours to do.

[FirstLight]

Yep, pretty much no matter what you are going to have a lot of work here. There are a couple things you may be able to do to cut down on your hours somewhat though. One would be the technique used by building and landscape photogs to quickly get rid of power lines. The other is a program I think it is called retoucher. It takes a LOT of memory on your machine, but it may work great for this. The program is intended for use on restoring cracks and scratches. You would simply paint over the lines of the cage and click play, it samples from nearby pixels to fill in the gaps of what you masked out/painted out. I think this woudl work better than the other thing, but if you have PS and don't want to buy that Retoucher program (or something similar) this can get you close-ish...

Dupe your bg layer, on the top layer add a mask and paint over the lines of the cage. I attempted really quickly to mask using color selection, etc, and not so good. Best bet is a small soft brush on layer mask or in quick mask mode, whichever way you prefer to work. Anywho, after you mask out say all of the vertical lines in the cage, use the nudge tool on the lower layer to move the layer (for vertical you would move the layer left or right) til you can't see the cage lines. You will end up with what looks like bad clone marks, but its a lot easier to come in then with your patch tool and get it looking natural. I posted an example. Part of him over his front left leg quarter and part of his face has been patched, the rest I just left as is. BTW you would need to do these steps twice, once for the vertical and once for the horizontal bars.

Ok, I hope some of that made sense - lol. BTW this took about 3 minutes.