Creative Silence Blog

Archive for the ‘Photo Editing’ Category

Cloning, in digital photography, has absolutely nothing to do with sheep.  Unless, of course, you want to use the cloning tool to turn an image of one sheep into a whole flock of them.

The Cloning tool is used to copy one part of the image into another area, or even into another picture entirely.  If your beautiful picture of clouds at sunset is ruined by the ugly electrical wires running across them, it can be fixed.  The wires can be painted right out of the picture by using the cloning tool to copy small bits of the clouds around the wires over top of them.

This technique can be time-consuming, especially if there’s a large area that needs work.  It’s also very easy to do it badly, with results that clearly look like they were cloned.  Remember to click on different areas of the picture to be the source of the cloning tool, because if you don’t, you can easily get a tell-tale pattern in the texture of the image.

Cloning is also useful in other ways.  Imagine two pictures of the same family portrait.  In the first, Grandpa is yawning.  The photographer saw that, and shot a second one, but he didn’t notice Junior sticking his tongue at his sister in the second shot.  Rather than throw away both pictures, the photo editor can take the smiling Junior from the first image, and clone it over the ugly one in the second photo.

Cloning is one of the most common tools used in photo faking, just as the family portrait example shows.  One recent example is Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj, who was was fired by Reuters.  He was caught using a cloning technique on his pictures, making battle damage in the 2006 Isreal-Lebanon conflict look much worse than it really was.

Imagine returning home from the family reunion, camera in hand, and waiting for the printed pictures to come back.  After a delay of at least hours, sometimes even days, the prints arrive, and in the most important picture–the family reunion shot–not only is there an ugly glaring neon sign in the background, but the tripod was off-balance, with one leg resting on a rock.  The entire crew seems to be seated on deck chairs on the Titanic, threatening to slide off the far left edge of the photo.

Don’t worry, there’s no need to call the entire family back for another reunion to re-shoot the picture.  What this photo needs is a bit of cropping and straightening.

Before photography went digital, both cropping and straightening were done in the printing process.  The printer would add a mask or frame to the picture to enclose only what he wanted to appear in the picture, and tilt (or just cut) the paper as necessary to make sure there was no cruise-ship leaning effect.

In today’s digital world of digital photography and editing software, it’s much easier to fix this sort of problem.  Scan the picture into your computer, load it into your favorite paint program, and it can be fixed in minutes.

First, most photo editing programs have a grid or reference line feature.  With a perfectly straight line to measure against, rotating the picture back onto dry land is child’s play.

And second, cropping comes naturally to photo programs as well.  Draw a box around the family–but not around the ugly sign–and crop away.  Be careful not to chop out any important details, like Uncle Vinnie’s ugly toupee and Aunt Marge’s red slippers.  And don’t forget to save a copy of the original, in case you need to do this again someday.  Then, email the corrected image to everyone who posed.

The best Wildlife photography will always show a crystal-clear animal against a blurry background.  This is done by using just the right combination of lens, aperture, and shutter speed, and really helps to make the subject stand out.  If a background of branches and leaves were as sharply focused as the bird in the foreground, it would be very easy to lose the bird in the background “noise.”

You can use photo editing techniques to achieve the same effect.

Load your picture into your favorite photo editing program.  Using a selection tool like a “Lasso,” select the foreground image, the “animal” that has to be set off from the “leaves and branches.”  Once it’s selected, “Invert” the selection.  Most photo editing programs have this option.  In effect, it means “swap the selected areas for the unselected ones.”  By inverting, you’ll select only the background of your image.  If your program has the feature, you might also consider Feathering your selection.  This helps to break up the outline of the selection, so that it doesn’t have such a sharp edge to it.

Once the background is highlighted, use a tool called Gaussian Blur.  This is a specific type of blurring routine designed to imitate the blurring that happens in traditional photography.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with the settings, but remember that a little bit of blur–leaving the background out of focus, but recognizable–is better than a lot.

A related photo technique is called Panning.  Focus on a moving object, like a racecar, and keep the camera pointed at that object as it goes by.  Done properly, the racecar will be in focus, while the crowd behind it will be blurred.  This kind of blur is called Motion blur, or sometimes Radial blur.  Using Radial instead of Gaussian will make your subject appear to be racing past the background.