Lego Photography 2

Lego Photography Continued

What do you do when your photograph just plain sucks?

There's nothing worse than downloading an image to your computer (or developing a roll of film) and realizing that you made a serious mistake on one of your images. Well, never fear! Digital technology is here! The following tutorial shows how I took a really bad image and transformed it into one of my favorites.

This picture is what I call a classic "problem image". Fortunately it is quite salvageable. There are two main things wrong with it. The first, and most obvious, is that it suffers from the "Isn't that my kitchen? Wasn't there supposed to be a white sheet of posterboard in front of that? Whoops!" syndrome. The second problem is that the image is quite crooked.

Fortunately, neither of these problems make the image unusable. The only problem that is nearly impossible to fix in post-production is blurring caused by poor focus or limited camera resolution.

Rotating the image 90 degrees counterclockwise makes it easier for me to work with. The first order of business is removing the background. I started with the same quick mask technique I used earlier on the tank image to select the background. This image shows the results of multiple applications of the magic wand tool to select the unwanted background elements. Those elements that are still present must now be manually painted out of the selection area. It is important to use an anti-aliased brush when painting in order to blur the transition between the replacement background and the retained original image.

Once I thought I was finished, I hit the tilde "~" key (a new feature in Photoshop 5) to examine my mask. This makes it really easy to see any unwanted black pixels and allows me to smooth any edges that are too aliased (or jagged). You can see the complexity of the mask in all of the stupid little window holes I had to painstakingly punch out.

You will notice that there is a strange black diagonal line on the top and left side of the image. Well, that's because when I was writing this tutorial, I got excited and took this image out of sequence. This is a result of a rotation operation which occurs in a future step. Pretend that the canvas hasn't been rotated yet, OK? The point of this step is to show how to refine the mask.

Now that the mask is correct, I save the selection (from the selection menu), and fill it in white (using the fill command). Everything looks pretty good. No more silly kitchen in the background.

As I mentioned earlier, the image isn't quite straight. So I used the arbitrary rotation tool to rotate the canvas until it looked roughly straight. The only problem is that now there is a big section of missing image on the right side, and some missing image on the left (where the other robber is standing). Half of his head which wasn't present in the original image is now visible. How do we deal with that?

There are two solutions to this problem.
1) Crop the image. This is the easy solution, but it would result in a loss of information.
2) Fudge. I like that solution. It's hard, but if I can fill out the missing portions of the image, no one will know.

It's clone tool time! I cropped the bottom part of the image to get rid of the superfluous white space at the bottom and went to town with my clone tool. The wall on the right side was relatively easy work. Most of it has very low contrast, so careful alignment and attention to detail filled in the missing portion of that image nicely. I hold down the option key and click the area I am cloning from to specify cloning origin.

The left side is a lot more difficult. There was no way to fabricate the missing half of the robber, so I decided to clone the guy on the right.

Now for the finishing touches. A little Unsharp Mask action brings focus to the detail. I prefer this operation to a basic Sharpen because I have a great deal of control over threshold, sharpening amount, and amount of processing to perform per pixel. I also did a very subtle Render Clouds to replace the plain white background, and a bit of color correction. Voila! A masterpiece!

What do you do when your photograph just plain sucks?

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	This picture is what I call a classic "problem image". Fortunately it is quite salvageable. There are two main things wrong with it. The first, and most obvious, is that it suffers from the "Isn't that my kitchen? Wasn't there supposed to be a white sheet of posterboard in front of that? Whoops!" syndrome. The second problem is that the image is quite crooked. Fortunately, neither of these problems make the image unusable. The only problem that is nearly impossible to fix in post-production is blurring caused by poor focus or limited camera resolution.
	Rotating the image 90 degrees counterclockwise makes it easier for me to work with. The first order of business is removing the background. I started with the same quick mask technique I used earlier on the tank image to select the background. This image shows the results of multiple applications of the magic wand tool to select the unwanted background elements. Those elements that are still present must now be manually painted out of the selection area. It is important to use an anti-aliased brush when painting in order to blur the transition between the replacement background and the retained original image.
	Once I thought I was finished, I hit the tilde "~" key (a new feature in Photoshop 5) to examine my mask. This makes it really easy to see any unwanted black pixels and allows me to smooth any edges that are too aliased (or jagged). You can see the complexity of the mask in all of the stupid little window holes I had to painstakingly punch out. You will notice that there is a strange black diagonal line on the top and left side of the image. Well, that's because when I was writing this tutorial, I got excited and took this image out of sequence. This is a result of a rotation operation which occurs in a future step. Pretend that the canvas hasn't been rotated yet, OK? The point of this step is to show how to refine the mask.
	Now that the mask is correct, I save the selection (from the selection menu), and fill it in white (using the fill command). Everything looks pretty good. No more silly kitchen in the background.
	As I mentioned earlier, the image isn't quite straight. So I used the arbitrary rotation tool to rotate the canvas until it looked roughly straight. The only problem is that now there is a big section of missing image on the right side, and some missing image on the left (where the other robber is standing). Half of his head which wasn't present in the original image is now visible. How do we deal with that? There are two solutions to this problem. 1) Crop the image. This is the easy solution, but it would result in a loss of information. 2) Fudge. I like that solution. It's hard, but if I can fill out the missing portions of the image, no one will know.
	It's clone tool time! I cropped the bottom part of the image to get rid of the superfluous white space at the bottom and went to town with my clone tool. The wall on the right side was relatively easy work. Most of it has very low contrast, so careful alignment and attention to detail filled in the missing portion of that image nicely. I hold down the option key and click the area I am cloning from to specify cloning origin. The left side is a lot more difficult. There was no way to fabricate the missing half of the robber, so I decided to clone the guy on the right.
	Now for the finishing touches. A little `Unsharp Mask` action brings focus to the detail. I prefer this operation to a basic Sharpen because I have a great deal of control over threshold, sharpening amount, and amount of processing to perform per pixel. I also did a very subtle `Render Clouds` to replace the plain white background, and a bit of color correction. Voila! A masterpiece!