Tag Archives: removal

Recovering a Fence Shot

In an earlier post, I had shared some images of and A340-600 operated by European Cargo that I saw at Bournemouth. What I didn’t include in that post was any images close to the rotation point, despite me having been well positioned for that. When I say well positioned, I omit one key element which is that there was a fence between me and the plane, and I wasn’t able to photograph above the fence. Shooting through it was the only option.

I tried a couple of things to mitigate the issue with the fence. First, I was as close to it as possible to take the fence wires as far out of focus as possible. I was also shooting wide open – again to try and throw the wires out of focus. The last thing I tried was to go with a low shutter speed to smear the wires as I panned. With this combination, I was hopeful that I wouldn’t really have the wires in the shots. I was wrong.

When I took a look at the shots, the fence was very obvious. I did start to wonder whether it would have been better to have the wires well defined as maybe that would be easier to remove. However, too late for that as the shots were done. Now to see if there was anything I could do to recover them to something usable (and by usable, I mean that might be shareable but nothing that was going to be a great publishable image).

I tried some of the healing tools in Lightroom to see if that would work. I was getting nowhere fast – possibly a sign of how little I understand the capabilities of the tools or maybe they are just not the right thing. Then I decided to try something else. Because of the way I had shot the image, none of the airframe was obscured. There was just the grey overlay from the fence. That made me think that it was more like a darker area of the shot. I decided to use the brush tool in the masking panel and draw some lines that were heavily feathered across the lines that the fence wire created. Having made a grid of these, I then bumped up the exposure for the mask.

The result was surprisingly effective. However, I then ended up with some overly bright areas at the edge of the mask. A rework of the mask to change the size and the feather amount and this time the result was pretty good. There were a few areas that were still a touch dark and I used a large, soft brush to address those parts. If you know what the original image looked like, you will probably spot the remnants of the work. If you had never known before, it’s possible that you might not notice how much work had been done on this.

Taking Out Reflections – Photoshop Experimental Features

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I have been using Lightroom since the initial version was released. It used to be quite a simple application and anything complex was undertaken in Photoshop. As Lightroom has got more and more capable, the number of times I go into Photoshop has reduced. What I didn’t realize until recently was that Adobe uses Photoshop as the proving ground for some of the features that will ultimately make their way into Lightroom. I thought that Camera Raw and Lightroom’s Develop module were identical and they almost are. However, not quite.

In Photoshop, they have a check box to allow you try experimental features. I found out about this related to a feature designed to remove reflections. Anyone who has taken a photo through a window will know that you can get reflections off the glass of things your side of the window and these can ruin an otherwise usable image. (Photographing through a window is not a great option but sometimes it is all you have to work with.)

This feature analyses the image to see what it thinks might be artifacts from inside the window and allows you to remove them. Interestingly, the slider that comes with it can be moved either way. You can fully remove the reflection or can fully remove the rest of the image and leave only the reflection. This can be rather fun to play around with.

I was interested in what this would do for some shots I had got while inside the airport at Narita a few years ago. It was a dark and rainy day and I did try to avoid reflections but was not always successful. Some of the shots I liked most from an action point of view were the ones with light from inside intruding into the shot. These were the ones I worked with. You can judge the results. As I have the before and after versions here. It isn’t perfect but it does work rather well for an experimental feature. I hope it gets productionised soon and finds its way into the Lightroom Develop module too.

Haze Filter

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The Creative Cloud version of Lightroom drops new features in to the software when the updates are installed. This is a nice thing to have happen but, unless you are paying attention, you might not be aware of some of the new features. It took me a while after the last update to learn that a new filter had been added that was designed to take haze out of images. This is a great idea. I have experimented with trying to remove the effect of haze in shots before but, because the effect varies by distance, it can be quite tricky to get something that doesn’t look totally wrong.

I have not played with the filter a lot but I did decide to try it out on a shot I took at Crater Lake a few years back. Wildfires had resulted in smoke in the air which meant the usual clear view across the lake was obscured. I thought I would see how the filter worked out. Above are the before and after shots. It is an improvement but obviously isn’t going to rescue a totally messed up shot. I did try a more aggressive setting but that looked wrong itself so this was the one I went with. We shall see if this has other uses for me over time.

Dust Spotting – It’s Over There!

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A slight change in direction today. I am going to talk about a post processing tip that I recently read in the NAPP magazine, Photoshop User. It was a tip about how to manage dust in images. This may be something that everyone knows about in which case I apologize for being late to the game.

Dust is a familiar problem to a lot of photographers. It isn’t familiar to a lot more but it should be given the number of shots you can see that have dust spots all over them. Cameras have got better in recent years with the addition of dust cleaning functions that shake the dust off. However, not all cameras have them and they don’t always work perfectly.

When shooting aircraft against a blue sky, dust spots can be particularly conspicuous. If the area with the spot already has a lot of detail in it, the chances are you won’t notice it – particularly if the aperture is reasonably wide. In that case, you don’t really have a problem. The difficulty with dust spots is that you can get to a point where you cease to be able to see them.

Lightroom has a nice feature to assist in dust spotting. If you zoom in to 1:1 view in the Develop module and press Page Up or Page Down, you can look at the whole image to use your spot removal tool. As it moves down to the bottom of the image, another press of the button will move you across and back to the top so you cover the whole image without having to think about it. In the past, I have used this technique combined with really ramping up the Blacks slider to make the dust show up. Even then, the results are not always perfect.

The tip from the magazine was the creation of two Tone Curves to help show up the dust. I will describe the creation of the curves at the bottom since it is a bit long-winded and many may not be interested. The two curves when applied to the image create a very freaky effect. You could actually think of it as a creative finish itself but I will leave you to decide on that one. You can save the curves as a preset and use them whenever you need them. (I assume you can do this too in Camera Raw if you are using Photoshop since ACR and Lightroom use the same processing.)

The colors will be really messed up but the effect will make the dust spots really jump out of the image. You might wonder why there are two curves but, interestingly enough, some spots will show up clearly with one curve but barely at all with the other. I tend to apply one curve and run across the image, then apply the other curve and run back the way I came. It really doesn’t take very long to do.

One thing to bear in mind with this. The technique finds dust spots you had no idea were there. You will start to think that your sensor is filthy. Yes, it is – BUT – most of this stuff is totally invisible. Don’t get paranoid. You can get messed up with this. I had some shots of a vintage prop aircraft and the slow shutter speeds had resulted in small apertures and more conspicuous dust. I ended up with so many spot removal edits that the image rendering took a lot longer than normal. I suspect I had gone overboard with those shots.

Do you have to do this with all shots? Nah. However, if you are planning on doing something significant with the shots and you are concerned to keep dust spots out of the image, this could be a good way for you to find the dust more quickly and get back to what you really want to be doing rather than hunting for dust which, I suspect, is not most people’s favorite task.

Creating the Curve:

The curves are reversed versions of each other. One of them starts at 0,0 and the other starts at 0,100. Create a point at each 10% across the x-axis with each point alternating between 0 and 100. You then have a very aggressive looking sine curve (or cosine curve for the alternate I guess).