Sometimes I love a photo but there is a seemingly insurmountable problem that ruins it. In this shot of Venice, Italy, the dense fog at dawn was stunning, as was the model, but the ugly railings that the city of Venice puts in all the wrong places made classically perfect shots difficult. In ordinary circumstances, the railings wouldn’t be that difficult to clone out. However, with fog it’s extremely challenging because the ultra subtle tones in the fog are so hard to blend correctly. It may take me a long time – years, actually – to think about solving a tough problem in Photoshop. It only took me a year and a half to work out the problem of removing the railings in this shot. I really didn’t think I could do it until this morning when I tried again. In the end, I used the content-aware feature and then I applied the clone tool on 18% opacity as I worked to blend the fog. It took a lot of finesse with the clone tool to make it work. My settings in this muted dawn light were .4 seconds, f/4, 1250 ISO, and I used a 24-105mm lens set to the widest focal length. I've attached both the before and after versions so you can see what I had to deal with.
2 Comments
May 25, 2017, 11:03:43 AM
Jim - I know, Rajan. I was afraid if I totally eliminated all the lines I would lose the texture of the marble, and I wanted to retain that. It's a fine line. I appreciate your close observations.
May 25, 2017, 11:01:43 AM
Rajan Parrikar - Jim,
Beautiful work eliminating the railing. One nit though: the lines of the shadow cast by the railing are still visible on the tiles. To be sure, they're muted, but still.