50mm Lens, Canon 50D, Photo Challenges, Photo Editing, Photography, Picfair

Is That What I Meant?

Sometimes the image you create takes awhile to get to its final form.  I was working on a panorama recently that did not have the most auspicious beginning:

A screenshot of the work in progress in Photoshop

A screenshot of the work in progress in Photoshop

It’s a start, but it needed a lot of work.  I started with the crop tool.  That way I could get an idea of what problems were going to need fixing, and what I was just cropping out, so therefore didn’t matter.  Once I had done that, the three largest problems were the missing sky, the missing building in the lower left corner, and the boats.  To re-create the sky and building in Photoshop you can use the lasso tool to select the area, then edit-fill-content aware fill.  This tells Photoshop to put in that area what it thinks should be there based on what else is close by in the photo.  In this case, it did a very nice job.  For the boats, there were just too many masts hanging out in the bottom of the photo, it was a pretty big distraction.  For those I used the healing brush, so where there were masts there was now just water.  The photo now looked something like this:

Not Quite There

ISO 500 50mm f/11 1/1000

This version shown is the Photoshop edits, plus some of the tweaking I did in Lightroom.  I wasn’t crazy about this color cast, but a bigger problem was lurking in the sky.  It’s a bit hard to see on a small screen, but there are a few spots where you can see the Photoshop transparency where there should be sky.  Just a few spots I missed when recreating the sky in that section of the photo.  So with that fixed, here is my final version:

Panorama final

ISO 500 50mm f/11 1/1000

I fixed the sky and dialed back the sepia tone in the water and land.  I did want to give the photo a bit of a nostalgic feel, so I kept the colors muted.  This is the final version that made it to my Picfair portfolio.  In this case, worth the effort of editing I think.  If you were wondering this photo was taken from Conwy Castle in Wales overlooking the harbor.  What do you think of the added in sky and building? I think Photoshop did a pretty good job filling those spots in.  Do you like the tone in the photo? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

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17 thoughts on “Is That What I Meant?”

  1. crazykatya says:

    Wow, thanks for sharing your process! I would have never suspected the building and sky were filled in, the finished product looks very natural. I like the final coloration you chose as well. Very nice job!

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  3. The ‘fill’ option in photoshop does a decent job most of the time, but sometimes you can get some weird results. 😀
    I like your final version, but I would probably have boosted the contrast a little bit. I like contrast.

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    • Yes, I sure have gotten weird results at times. This is one feature of Photoshop that I do actually think has improved quite a bit over the last few years though. I feel the same way about the healing brushes, although you can get awkward results still with those.
      I go back and forth about how I feel about contrast, I tend to like it, but over the last few months I have created several images where I have actually turned down the contrast.

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    • It’s the ugly-ish building in the lower left corner in the final. In the original you can see how it is part of a building and then transparency? So, part of the cropping process removed most of the transparency but there was still transparency that had to be filled in with bricks from the building. The content aware fill in this case did a very good job of replicating those bricks I think.

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