This is a unique photograph in that I had to do major Photoshop reconstruction to make it successful. I took this image in the 90’s on 35mm film. The Alaskan brown bear was aggressive, very scary, and before seeking shelter in the cabin I was renting, I was able to get off a single shot with a 500mm telephoto. Unfortunately, due to the shallow depth of field, the nose of the bear is too soft. But that wasn’t the main problem. In my haste to shoot quickly and avoid a deadly encounter, I cropped off the right side of the bear’s head in this vertical composition. The entire right ear (our right) was cut off. I loved the shot but obviously was disappointed with the way 20% of the head was missing, so I expanded the canvas (Image > canvas size) to the right, copied the left side of the head and pasted it on the right side, flipped it horizontally (Edit > transform > flip horizontal), and then spent two hours blending the two images. Most of the time was devoted to rearranging the pattern in the hair so this didn’t look like a Photoshop repair job. I used Topaz Sharpen AI on the nose twice, and that did help a lot but it’s still not perfect. The settings were unrecorded.
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