Pixel Painter Loc: Ogden, Utah

Thanks EW, and all the others that posted the actual solutions and step by step instructions. That's what this forum is all about. :thumbup:

birdpix Loc: South East Pennsylvania

To answer your question about how to shoot on days like this, here is what I do: I shoot Manual. I meter off something that is approx neutral gray and use that to shoot birds against the skylight. If you try to meter, the cloudy sky, which is acting like one big difused light, will throw the light reading way off. Almost no matter what, the sky will be blown out and one of the only ways to fix it is to do what has been said about Photoshoping a blue sky in. As to picture #2, it looks like you were shooting nearly into the sun or at least towards the brightest part of the sky. On these types of days it can be very difficult to get a good shot. Sometimes moving around to put the brightest light behind you helps. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

[quote=English_Wolf3) Click on quick selection tools, drag the brush inside the bird, don't need much here.

See what a good night does?[/quote]

Sadly, My CS4 does not seem to have a selection tool of the sort you used in CS5.



We both had to use the lasso tool to refine the edges. I also cloned from both the empty sky and the nearest bird area to fill in some small gaps along the birds edges. That was particularly true on the upper side of the neck. There is an area of blown out white feathers at the bird's posterior. There is nothing much to be done about that except by painting in faint detail there as one might guess would be present. That is not the most desirable recourse except where picture recovery is paramount.

There are selection smoothing tools available, but I have not mastered them. I go through a series of feathering, expanding, or contracting the selection edge and finish up by leaving the appropriate feathering number in place. Sometimes that is large where blending is important, and others as small as it allows where a sharp edge is wanted, as in this case. If such an image needs further blending that can be addressed separately.


Sorry for the delay; it took two good nights.

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

[quote=Bobber]


What a blind idiot I am, it was right there in front of me under the selection tab.

English_Wolf Loc: Near Pensacola, FL

lo, you are neither blind nor an idiot, you maybe tired, as I was, that is it.

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

Old too.

Should have seen me this afternoon. A few days back one of our cats had some kind of seizure. He was totally inert and limp. He looked and felt very dead. With him at near twenty years old it was convincing. I sadly went out and dug a grave. When I got back to the house and went to where he was, there the old fraud was sitting up looking bright eyed with his sister grooming him. So today, I took him out to see his grave. Not everyone has that opportunity. Anyway, I shot some pictures of him enjoying the experience. Once trying for a low angle with the camera, I found I could not get up from a squat. In fact I ended up tipping over completely and rolling on the ground. Yeah, I managed finally to recover my feet, but I was glad to be the lone witness.

English_Wolf Loc: Near Pensacola, FL

Ok, now, what can anyone answer to that?

One thing, a platitude: You are only as old as your mind yet your body knows better and so do you.

Don't squat so much. unless needed and keep on going, the energizer bunny said so until I ate it.

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

Well ol' canine, you'd be splitting sides and shaking lose body parts at my efforts at quick masking. I got one made, but I'll be kicked to death by grass hoppers, if I can get it to join the bird and the sky properly. I can put a wonderful bird silhouette on a sky But no bird inside.

Time to go back and start from scratch. I need to get the principles of this thing down on something simple before spending a lot of time on an image with somewhat complicated edges. I'm pulling out reference books.

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

I seem to have got somewhere. It took some doing and I felt a need for some fresh envisioning of this job. The old set was a little shop worn.

Either method gets to about the same place. Each has its advantages depending on the subject matter.

I hope Shane T is encouraged by these efforts to stick with it until the technique starts to jell as an accomplished mastery.

Did Shane catch this bird with a little bit of fill flash?

English_Wolf Loc: Near Pensacola, FL

Now this looks like an Armageddon type of shot!!!

So different that it makes it interesting.

The question is: Do you take notes when you do something so as to share as a tutorial?

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

I should, but no. I am not that well organized. Especially when I don't know what I am doing and just bashing into the task hoping I can manage something. That turned out to be the case this time.

After calling up the quick mask function this time, then painting the thing in. I got around to sticking the sky into the stack of layers. I could not get the bird to show up, but all other different kinds of images mixing in bird shaped pieces of sky and other variations, none of which were where I wanted to go. I finally got the "crawling ants" of the selection by saving it, then applying it to fresh versions of the bird for copying and sticking it to the sky separately. Masking always has been a tender topic with me, confusion being supreme.

I took special care with the painting on this one, and the selection came out better than it did using the other selection tools. Instead of it strictly being a dragging or drawing process, where an unsteady hand is harder to make behave, the painting technique allows one to match up the edge of the circle of the brush being used to the edge of the selection and click when ready. Corrections are easy to make by switching to the opposite painting color and knocking out any over runs. Where the click does not quite reach the edge, it is even easier, just nudge the brush a bit and click again.

I only messed with about three other items in this last effort. That was that white blown out patch of feathers on the back towards the bird's rear, where I worked in some faint detail in place of the blown out whiteness for one thing.

Then where the sky seemed to merge with the feathers on the back of the neck I used a separate bird copy in the stack as a guide. This copy was darkened until it was either black bird or white sky. Any pixel with any thing except white turned black. This gave the best available view of that neck-sky margin. I with that on top and the layer original bird layer active, I was able to paint in the selection there as accurately as was possible, not just by guessing where the invisible edge was and drawing a line by eye across the blank whiteness starting and ending at what was visible.

Another tweak was to use the Replace Color operation from Image-Adjustments tabs. I have found this to be a greatly useful tool in many situations. In this case for example after the separate bird and sky layers had been fine tuned for brightness, contrast, and other general appearances, to fit a bird flying in twilight conditions, a small spot or two on the bird were too bright. I would use this tool to selectively pick up on that area and darken it. This tool has a "picker" that can be clicked on a spot to make another kind of selection, a specific color at a specific light level. A slider can extend the selection to much wider spread of that same color and light level. A thumb nail view gives a picture of just what picture parts are involved, by highlighting them. This tool gives control on lightness, hue, and saturation and has wide application in making corrections. I wish it had a capability of creating the usual crawling ants selection. It would give more control over making color selections than the Select-Color Range selector does.

If there are any specific points anyone is curious about, make them known, and I'll will try to come up with an answer. Otherwise, I tried to follow the protocol Wolf outlined, though, it did not seem to work out exactly as intended.

Armageddon! Yeah, that is a pretty bloody sky. That scene is in front of my home. The trees are not only leafless from winter, but also (the two most prominent) from oak wilt, a fungus disease, that has wiped out countless live oak trees that once graced so much of the landscape in these parts. That disease is playing much the same role with live oaks as was played with chestnut trees in the Eastern U.S. This is recent, something like the last 20 to 25 years.

As a result, currently the ecological designation of this area being a live oak savannah seems to be getting phased into something else. I won't hazard a guess as to the percent loss of live oaks around here, but it is high. Our recent dry spell has had one benefit; it has killed off a lot of the local infestation of ash juniper. It remains to be seen whether some other tree will take the place of the live oak.

In the mean time we have a lot of picturesque tree skeletons around to make some places look like winter all year long.

Shane T Loc: Central Florida

My apologies for not getting back you any of you over the last day or two. I had a minor emergency and was not able to get to a computer at a decent time.
I really want to thank everyone who has participated. I have learned SO MUCH from just this posting. The pictures are just beautiful and thanks for the step-by-steps. I have them printed out and in my notebook (geek that I am) for future reference.
Can't wait to try some of these on some other pics I though might be garbage. Maybe I can save some. :thumbup:

Bobber Loc: Fredericksburg, Texas

We don't always make clear in the finest detail just how we cooked some of this work into some form of dish. So feel free to come back to the topic and ask. Or PM if you like.

I have also used the opportunity this discussion has offered to learn English Wolf's approach. I stumbled a lot along the way, and understand very well that trying to turn a procedural outline into a finished product can be troubling.

Users very familiar with a software procedure too easily forget, that a simple direction to use some tool can become a very tall order for a person, who does not even know where to look on their monitor screen for the blasted thing. With the all the varieties of Photoshop, the working screen is so chock full of stuff in view, and worse, hidden underneath, that just learning where and a little of what the items are, is considerable.

Good luck to you, and just to show that your photographic vision is a grabber look below, and see where it took me off to next. I was amazed at the detail in the eye of the bird, when I enlarged it in the process of working with it. To catch that on the litteral fly was an achievement.