As bird photographers, we all run into the same issue of unwanted "material" showing up in our captures. We all try to deal with these issues in varying ways, but all in an attempt to improve our images.
I've contemplated this thread over the last couple of months as I've worked and reworked some of the images of hummingbirds I've collected this summer. I don't have the luxury of hundreds of captures per session as others have reported so I feel as though I've got to fight for every image I can get. It has resulted in a lot of practice retouching images that had "obstructions" that I felt negatively affected the image I wanted. I thought there might be some interest on this board in the before and after images as well as the tools and tricks I've learned.
To start, all my editing and retouching are done using Photoshop CS5 on a Windows platform. I hope some of the tools I use are shared with other Adobe photo editing software packages.
1. The first couple of images are my attempts to capture the hummer just outside the flower in order to show the entire bird and flower. As you can see below, there is an unwanted shadow on the tip of the beak.
2. The fix I chose was to use the Clone Stamp Tool to select some lighter pixels from the proximal part of the beak and use those to lighten the shaded tip of the beak. Straightforward and pretty easy.
3. I liked the bird "reaching" for the Bee Balm in this image, but didn't like the flower overlapping the right wing.
4. I used the Spot Healing Brush tool in Content Aware Mode to help remove the flower overlapping the wing and had to finish with a few strokes of the Clone Stamp Tool to renew some of the underwing details. The remainder of the flower was removed using a combination of the Clone Stamp and Spot Healing Brush tools. A little more involved.
5. Now we have a part of a flower obstructing the tip of the tail of this little guy.
6. I remember being mad that the Spot Healing Brush wasn't doing what I wanted it to do here, so I had to result to the Clone Stamp Tool to refashion the tail tip. I then removed the rest of the flower with the combo of Spot Healing and Clone Stamp. A little touchy, but not terribly complex.
7. I fell in love with the pose/posture of this image immediately! I also knew that I had to do a better job of revealing the feet. This one was tough! It took me 4 attempts and 2 weeks to finally figure this one out.
8. Here again is part of the plant obstructing part of the bird. The process I finally used successfully included a pixel mask of just the feet so I could rebuild them first. I re-colored the feet using the Clone Stamp tool and pixels from the small part of the feet not obstructed by the plant. After that, I proceeded to use the Clone Stamp tool, the Spot Healing Brush, and the Healing Brush tool to remove the remainder of the plant below and rebuild the gradient background (more on that in a minute). One caveat.....don't look at the feet too closely!
2 big things I learned in doing these and others: 1) apply any noise reduction necessary to the image before using the retouching tools mentioned above, and 2) the best tool for rebuilding gradient backgrounds is the Healing Brush tool. Secondarily the Spot Healing Brush works pretty well too.
I'd like to think that if I hadn't told you about the retouching I did you'd have never noticed it. That would be the main reason why I torture myself this way.
My other hope in doing this thread is to help those interested in cleaning up there images a little bit see that it's not really rocket science. It's mostly about the desire to present a cleaner image and the patience to put up with the tedium that is sometimes required. I've also given those that want to try 4 good examples of before and after images here to practice on if you so choose; and I'd love it if others could add any additional tools and/or methods they find helpful too. My "Image Editing OK" lamp is lit and thanks for stopping in to check these out!
If you did, thanks Steve, it shows what can be done wth the right skills, tools, and patience. And you see, now I have an excuse....my version of Photoshop (the old Version 7) doesn't have some of the more recent additions like "Context Aware Mode". Sigh. Maybe I should get a newer version! In any event, nicely done, and good work on your part.
