I really liked the lines in this image, but the background was horrible. See below for a description of what I did to it. I’ll also post a jpeg of the unprocessed image.
Unprocessed Image:
What technical feedback would you like if any?
Anything. As you can see, the background was extremely busy and contrasty. After a number of attempts to tame it with cloning and painting over it, I duplicated the background layer, eliminated the bird and perch from it (In this case I cloned over them, but selecting and replacing with a fill would probably have worked better). I then did s serious lens blur on that layer so that the texture was essentially gone. As a final step, I reduced the opacity of the layer just enough to let a hint of the original texture through. I’ll let you be the judges of whether or not it worked.
What artistic feedback would you like if any?
Anything.
Pertinent technical details or techniques:
7DII, Sigma 150-600 C @ 435 mm, Gimbal head mounted to blind window, f/7.1, 1/250, iso 1250, fill flash at -2 2/3 EV. Processed in LR & PS CC. A slight crop. Taken at 9:00 am on November 8th.
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You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
I like the pose and detail in the jay. I like the perch and filling in the hole was a good idea. Good job on blurring the background. My only thought would have been to alter the dark area in the left upper corner. Nice lighting, by the way.
Hi Dennis, I’m curious as to how you did this. My approach is to make a selection of the bird and perch and then apply whatever changes I would want to the background on the inverse selection. How do you get the bird back on your duplicated background layer? Also, I’m not clear on what you mean by “selecting and replacing with a fill”. Thanks, Allen.
Dennis, I love the way he is looking up at you. That perch is a really nice one, and, I have to say, your post processing did the trick. I have had problems with busy backgrounds in some of my macro shots, because the background was too close to the lens, and having to use a high numbered f-stop. So, I will have to play around in Photoshop to see if I can save some of my images. Great shot.
Hi @Allen_Brooks. I do somewhat the same thing you do, but when I select the bird and perch (sometimes together and sometimes separately), I put them on a separate layer or layers The bird goes at the top of the layer stack with the perch underneath:
This lets me go back and forth. I use Topaz Remask for making the selection and it can be configured to automatically place the selection on another layer. If you’re using Photoshop, when you have the bird selected, simply do a copy and paste and it will automatically create a new layer to put the pasted bird selection in.
As for the selecting and replacing with fill, if you have the bird selected, go to the background layer:
Then use the eraser with the selection still active to erase the bird/perch:
With the selection still active, select [edit] [fill] [content aware]:
And you’ll get something like this:
Deselect and then blur that layer however you like:
Tweak the opacity and turn on visibility of the bird and perch layers and you’re done.
The reason for removing the bird and perch is that the blur process spreads out their colors and you get halos if you don’t. Here’s a version where I blurred a layer without removing the perch and bird. You can see the dark halos around the bird. Since the tonality of the perch and background are pretty similar, the halos aren’t as evident there.
I hope this clarified my process. There are a ton of ways to do this and some are probably much more elegant than this.
1 Like
Dennis, thanks for taking the time to do this. Something I’ll need to try and practice with.
An excellent capture of this Jay, Dennis! Great detail and you did an excellent job of separating & softening the background. Well done!
Hi Dennis, nice job with processing the background. I like the pose and being able to see the bits of blue on the bird’s forehead. Well done.
