Wildlife Photography across the Water: healing brush

Sunday, 2 May 2010

Photoshop CS5-First thoughts

Yesterday i purchased and downloaded the new version of Adobes Photoshop-CS5, I have been a photoshop user for years and love the programme but recently i have been disappointed by some of the colours and have been using Phase Ones Captures one 5.1.1 which renders the colours much better than photoshop, Adobe announced CS5 a few weeks ago and the big selling point was the content aware feature where the software recognises the surrounding pixels and replaces the cloned item with something to match i.e you remove something from the scene quickly and easily just by drawing around it, I dont normally take stuff from a scene but i did have a couple of images from my recent trip to Florida that were prime candidates for this tool so yesterday i had a play, There are 2 ways to use the content aware feature, Firstly by using the healing brush and secondly by using the lasso tool, I took a Manatee image with a diver in the background and drew around the diver with the lasso tool then hit delete and return, Two seconds later and a message comes up saying there was not sufficient RAM available-Hmm not a good start and shows that the new programme is probably better aimed at 64 bit hardware with plenty of RAM, I had dark corners on the Manatee images and drawing around those quickly removed the dark areas and matched the surrounding areas , So it does work, Today i processed an image of a Curlew with a gull in the far background, I tried to remove the gull with both the lasso and then the healing brush and i must say that you could see where it had been so i tied the normal way without the content aware tool and it was much better so to say i was a bit disappointed would be an understatement, My buddy Pete showed me an image of a night heron that had a couple of twigs in front of it and he had removed them very successfully with the content aware healing brush-you would have never known that they were there so it proves that in some situations its a great tool but its not a gift sent from heaven that will work on every image

Its still early days and i have only had a couple of hours playing with the new CS5, It seems a tad faster to load the images in bridge and with a decent machine i am sure it will fly, There are plenty of videos on you tube that show what the software is capable of, If you already run CS3 or CS4 then the price of the upgrade wont break the bank, The colours are supposed to be improved and yesterday i processed a manatee image in both CS5 and Capture One and they were hard to tell apart, I will have to process a harlequin duck that i took last January and see how that looks as they are the images that CS4 had trouble getting right, As time goes on i will report back on CS5 and give some more views once that i have had a good chance to play with it

Dave

Friday, 3 July 2009

To Clone or to Heal

This week i have processed about 300 images, All images needed some healing,a few cloning and some both-Whats the difference and why and when would you use these tools, The cloning tool does what it says,it clones or copies exactly and the healing brush works out what the pixels are like surrounding the brush and blends the area in so that the dust spot or whatever disappears,Dust is a digital photographers biggest pain, Dust removal systems built into some camera bodies help but dont totally irradicate dust and if you shoot with plain backgrounds like sky,snow or walls then dust will show up as grey dots-these are easily removed with the healing brush, But on a few images of mountain goats in snow i had a small piece of rock intruding into an edge of the image,if i tried to remove this with just the healing brush i would end up with a smudged colour so i had to clone a small line along the image edge then use the healing brush on all of the rock this gave a perfect removal, The same goes with anything that touches the image edge like a power cable running right across the image, Clone both ends then use the healing brush on the middle bit-here i would actually chop the cable up into small pieces with the clone tool and then use the healing brush on the smaller pieces,When i processed my fox images there was traces of dog food on some of the tree stump and i would clone some similar tree bark over this,if i had used the healing brush i would have ended up with smudged bark, I personally dont see a problem in removing small items in an image-enhancing it rather than changing it

Dave

Bio's

David Courtenay, a self taught wildlife and nature photographer, has been capturing images for over 30 years. He has had a passion for wildlife since early childhood and remembers being glued to the television whenever Survival, Wildlife on One and other natural history documentaries were shown. In the 2006 he swapped his established career for the life of a wildlife photographer, such a move demands a measure of uncompromising passion and commitment.

David has travelled extensively throughout Europe as well as spending more than 7 months in India working with local guides and trackers in search of Bengal Tiger, Asian One horned Rhino and Asian Elephant. He has also photographed Wildlife in Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Sumatra, Africa, Canada and America. Working closely with Conservation companies he tries to raise funds to help Wildlife that has been put on the endangered list by poaching and habitation loss

Martin Dyer has had a passion for avian wildlife since childhood, particularly raptors. Photography was also another keen interest and it was with the specific availability and control of the whole process that digital offers that Martin was then able to combine the two in 2003. Based in the UK, Martin is a regular visitor to Scotland, specifically the Isle of Mull to watch the Eagles resident there. Other trips to Europe and around the UK are usually part of Martin’s agenda in a typical year.

However, as a firm believer on making the most of the local patch, Martin has spent a lot of time and hard work creating a wildlife garden which is reaping the rewards with many new species and varieties of wildlife. A keen member of a number of wildlife photographic groups, Martin is keen to expand his portfolio into other areas of wildlife, and has already established a wide portfolio of images of fungi.