Archive for February, 2010

I thought I would do a little bit of instructional post today.  I shot JD yesterday at the train tracks and I lit him with a single gridded head and it lit his face well and kept the exposure of the background looking correct.  However, the background is the problem.  Have you ever taken a photo and thought, “If only that man with the pizza box weren’t in the background it would be a great photo?” My thoughts were similar to that on this photo where I thought the photo was nice and I did a little cross-processing on it and liked it.  But, the background on the left really looked bad.

So what I did was to use the pen tool (in Photoshop) and outline very close to his hair and across his shoulder to mask off the part I wanted to remove down to the top of the silo.  If you’ve never used the pen tool you should consider it because it is an excellent way to mask more accurately. After the selection was made I simply used the clone tool and since I had lots of blue sky I sampled the sky and cloned it over the parts I wanted to remove.  Since all of that was next to and “behind” his head the mask allowed me to clone remove very accurately so it looks like nothing was there in the beginning.

If you have any questions about specifics shoot me an email.  I wanted to illuminate the concepts and point you in the direction as to how you might be able to do the same thing on your photos.