Shoot & Edit Week 4

Shoot & Edit is a wonderful photography bloghop with two parts every week. On Monday, Jill of Forever ‘n Ever ‘n Always Photography posts a photography tutorial and challenge. Participants are asked to link up their shots straight out of the camera. Then on Thursday, Ashley Sisk of Ramblings and Photos posts an editing tutorial. I’ve already learned so much!

This week touches a lot on color correction, which you know I struggle with greatly. My hatred of correcting colors in editing is why I’m so head over heels delighted that I finally know how to set a custom white balance.

On Tuesday we woke up with snow on the ground and the kids were dying to get outside in it. I tried standing outside with them, but being from Atlanta and now living in Fort Worth, I do not own clothes warm enough for the weather we got this week. Neither do the boys, actually so I had to layer them up to the max even though I knew they were only going to be out there for 10-15 minutes at the most. I was just too cold to stay out there, so I went back inside and looked out the back door. Boa was getting upset, but didn’t want to come inside so my mom picked him up. I snapped a bunch of pictures, but even though I put my lens close to the glass, there was still some glare left over that pretty much spoiled the shots.

This is one with minimal window glare, on the lower right hand side of the image. In a lot of the other shots you could see my green striped jacket quite clearly and fixing that is way past my abilities. I had no idea how I was going to fix this image either, but I tried a few things and I’m not displeased with the results.

Solid Color Adjustment Layer

The first thing I try is a solid color adjustment layer the color of my mom’s jacket to see if I can “paint” the glare away.

With the eyedropper tool, I select a color from my mom’s jacket. Then, at the bottom of my layers palette from the half black/half white circle menu I choose “Solid Color…”. I set the layer mode to Overlay so the details come through and invert the layer mask so it’s black instead of white. (I wrote more about “painting on” effects with a layer mask instead of removing them in last week’s shoot & edit.)

I paint my mom’s entire jacket with a 30% opaque soft white brush, then switch to 80% opacity to concentrate on the glare. As seen in the results on the right, most of the glare is removed this way, but if you click through to the larger version it’s easy to see it’s still there.

Patch Tool

I usually use the patch tool and the clone stamp for similar things. If I want to get rid of something in the photograph and make it look like another part of the photograph. I’ll use the clone stamp for any small area (like power lines or more often bits of fuzz from my carpet) but I use the patch tool for larger areas since the result from cloning isn’t always as natural for large areas.

In Photoshop, select the patch tool from the Tools window, a couple icons under the crop tool. By default, the icon probably looks like a band-aid and indicates it’s the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Hold down the icon and the sub-menu comes up where you can select the Patch Tool. With the cursor, draw around the spot on your photo you want to replace and then drag the selection to a similar area of the photograph. Viola! The old patch is replaced with something that looks a lot like the area you chose to copy.

I continue to select smallish patches to replace because the part of the jacket I can “copy” is pretty small. I don’t want to put seams or wrinkles on the area I’m replacing, so I make sure the patches are small enough to avoid them.

After patching, I’m completely satisfied with the removal of the glare. At that point, I resume editing the photograph like I normally do, with a levels adjustment layer, high pass filter for clarity and sharpening. I read through Ashley’s tutorial again and looked over an enlightening SmugMug tutorial on skin tone. It tells me the numbers to look out for. When I sample my mom’s face, there are parts where the magenta is higher than the yellow.

I follow their “easy way” guidelines for correcting it and with some slight adjustments I’m pleased with the results, used in my final edit. (I tried their “advanced” method and although I understood the directions, the results looked like something Andy Warhol would have done.)

My final result is below. Hover over the image to view it compared to the SOOC: