I am sharing a corrected photo showing detail from a church
buttress in Queretaro, Mexico, from December, 2010. This was a fun photo to work on, because it
was taken in dim light, and had four electric wires across the middle. Color correction in camera raw, and wire
removal using the pen tool and content aware healing brush, both worked like a
charm. You can see all of my photos here: Barbara Johnston's Project 2
Here are my answers to the Project 2 questions:
11.
What was your
experience in using Camera Raw to correct color in your images.
On the whole I’d say Camera Raw
worked very well to correct colors.
Increasing contrast, highlights and blacks worked particularly well for
me. The exceptions to my general success
were my attempts to correcting old faded color pictures. I had several that I tried to modify, but
none was successful, so none are included in my web page. No matter how I changed the various settings,
I was never able to get a natural look without some sort of color cast.
22.
What guided how you cropped your images? Explain your intention.
Several goals guided my cropping of
images.
*
When an
image is rotated using the ruler tool, an automatic crop occurs to get rid of
otherwise irregular edges.
*
But I made several intentional crops to narrow
down the point of interest in a picture.
Thus, in my photo of a wildlife refuge, I narrowed the focus down to a
big white bird landing in the water, and his reflection. And in my photo of a Mexican boy, I cropped
out the image of his mother. She had
originally been partly cut out of the
picture, and I removed the rest of her image, putting all attention on the boy.
* And finally, I made a crop in the photo in which
I used perspective adjustment to achieve a straight-on view of a wall
advertisement. I cropped everything
outside of the advertisement itself, essentially as a byproduct of the
perspective correction.
33.
How did you use content-aware in modifying your images?
I used content-aware a lot in correcting
these images, but not always successfully.
*
My best experience was in the church buttress
photo. Use of the content-aware healing
brush is integral to removing the wires.
The only hitch was that in the very bottom of the buttress, the tool
deposited a white patch amid the rust colored paint. I then used the content aware healing brush
again over just that spot, and it successfully returned it to rust color.
*
In the photo of the Mexican boy, I attempted to
remove the image of the boy’s Mom by selecting her image and then brushing with
the content-aware healing brush. Mostly,
it did not work, because instead of inserting the background water, it inserted
portions of the boy’s face.
*
In the photo of the Puerto Vallarta church, I
used the content-aware healing brush to attempt to remove the date stamp, and
to attempt to remove the scaffolding around the church tower. It was more successful with removing the date
stamp, but it deposited a clump of grass on the curb, and removed the ridge
around the middle of the planting pot. I
was able to correct both of those using the clone tool (see next question/answer). The church tower scaffolding simply didn’t
want to go away. I ended up using the
clone tool (see next question/answer).
44.
In what way did the clone stamp tool assist you to
modify your images?
I actually like the clone stamp tool quite a lot more than the
content-aware healing brush. The clone
stamp tool performed a lot of clean up for me.
*
In the photo of the Mexican boy, the clone tool
very successfully reproduced the texture and look of the background water from
other parts of the picture. I was quite
amazed by how successful this was.
*
In the photo of the Puerto Vallarta Church, I used
the clone tool to repair the curb (removing a clump of grass) and to restore
the pot to more or less its original look.
The content-aware healing brush had left a blotchy patch in the middle
of the pot, eliminating the raised ridge that encircles the pot. I used the clone stamp tool to repair that
area, using cloned sections from both the shady side and the sunny side of the
pot. Because the ridge changes angles as
it circles the pot, I used the rotation feature in the clone tool window to
rotate the cloned material before I stamped with it. I was pretty impressed by how well that
worked.
*
Also in the photo of the Puerto Vallarta Church,
I used the clone tool to completely remove the scaffolding. Because I used a brush size that was fairly
small, and used clone samples from various parts of the sky, the sky around the
tower ended up looking fairly scrubbed.
I changed the hardness of the tool to much softer, and made the brush
size much bigger, and that seems to have fixed the problem. I really was not aware that the big expanse
of sky is a different color in different sections, and I think that is the
problem I was experiencing.
55.
How would you use these tools in future projects?
I think these tools will see a lot of use in
future projects. I will use them in much
the same way I used them here, and no doubt there will be additional uses I
will discover (or be taught) for them.
Camera raw appears to be useful in every case – with the exception of
old faded photographs. Cropping appears
to be something that nearly every photo can use, to a greater or lesser
extent. I think I will use the
content-aware healing brush less than others, except where the adjacent content
is quite simple. I look forward to
seeing the CS-6 version of this feature.
The most novel and interesting tool of all of these is the clone stamp tool,
which I anticipate using frequently.
Here's a link to my webpage with the Project 1 photos: Barbara Johnston's Project 1
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