lwerthe1mer Loc: Birmingham, Alabama

I am trying to substitute a sky in this photo. I used an A1 Quick Mask, trying to insert "green" at some very small placed. One place I messed up was between the wings. Any suggestions on completing this edit, or whether the photo is worthwhile?

Many thanks.

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Rongnongno Loc: FL

Masking is used to show/hide where an effect takes place.

White shows.
Black hides.

So you just have to adjust your mask by 'painting on it'.

twosummers Loc: Melbourne Australia or Lincolnshire England

I think your masking maybe ok and you're just seeing a lighter bit of your sky. I had a play with your image - it's very good I must say (your image that is)

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lwerthe1mer Loc: Birmingham, Alabama

Thanks for your comments and Twosummers, for your excellent work. I need to be more careful with my masking. Perhaps the more difficult areas should be masked at 200-300% magnification with a perfect brush.

I also much prefer Twosummers’ background to the one I selected.

Thanks again.

gouldopfl

So far Luminar AI has IMO the best sky replacement which got even better in the update this week. It is sale for 59.95 right now.

Delderby Loc: Derby UK

Yes - an improvement except the sun seems to be in the wrong place.
I've added a bit of Easy Photo Unblur see attached.

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Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

This is an area that I am still learning about. One challenge of it is that even when working closely with a brush to mask out the background vs the foreground, one finds that on the one hand a fuzzy brush gives a more natural edge than does a "hard" edged brush, but the mask made with a fuzzy brush can leave a fringe of the original background colors while a mask made only with a hard-edged brush gives a very unnatural looking final result. The subject will look like its cut-and-pasted on.
Various tricks to resolve that, but one is to use a hard brush to completely remove the foreground edge, losing some pixels of it (it looks unnatural then), but to then go over the mask edges with a blur tool to re-create a more graded mask edge.

Delderby Loc: Derby UK

This is where IA scores.

Toment Loc: FL, IL

Lovely photos: OP’s et al. Thanks for sharing

lwerthe1mer Loc: Birmingham, Alabama

Thanks for the comments and discussion. I also am trying to improve my masking abilities. These comments are very helpful.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I'm seeing a lot of artifacts around the perimeter of the bird... some of it looks like the selection was done with a few pixels of "feathering". Add to that, when the entire image is sharpened, there's a noticeable "halo" appearing all around the bird.

All this could be "cloned out" with a lot of hand work, all around the perimeter of the bird. But it would have been better to do selective sharpening of the bird alone, after more precise selection were made (without any feathering around the outline of the bird).

I'd like to see the original image as large as possible, to experiment and see if the mask/selection could be done better.

one_eyed_pete Loc: Colonie NY

Detailed masking with today's software is loads easier than 10 years ago. Even with that masking complicated subjects (hair, fur, feathers) can require high enlargement, very small brush, steady hand and lots of patience. I use Photoshop for that task and I'm no expert but the current version has a lot of fine adjustment tools included to help the result look as natural as possible. Lately I've been using masking to colorize a very old family portrait that was nearly faded to B&W.

I bet you do have the expertise. Keep at it.

grichie5

Can you post a site with the sale price? My searches do not show a sale!

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Okay, I couldn't help myself.... I had to try a little Photoshop on this image. I wasn't clear from your original post whether or not you'd already replaced the sky. My best guess was that this was the sky you wanted to use (and it works well with the subject).

First I tried to "clean up" some of the artifacts and halo I was seeing all around the bird, perhaps from previous work done on it. Simply used Photoshop clone tool by hand and worked with the image significantly enlarged (200 or 300%, probably).

Next I did a selection (instead of a mask or a layer & mask... both of which also could have worked).

To do this I used "color selection tool", selecting the background sky. The reason I chose to select the sky was because of the smoother tonalities and the greater similarity of the colors. Doing this, some of the bird inadvertently got selected too, so I used lasso tool to subtract any of that from the selection.

Then I inverted the selection, so it was the bird instead of the sky that was the "active" area of the image being worked upon.

Finally I refined the selection slightly by contracting it 1 pixel. Doing this avoids the artifacts and halos around the perimeter of the bird. The "edge" between the bird and the background is already plenty sharp after I did the artifact/halo cleanup.

Now I was able to work on the bird and only the bird.

First I sharpened the details of the bird a bit. This does make for some artifacts on its body, although I think they're a lot less noticeable there. While the bird was still selected, I also slightly lightened the mid tones and boosted contrast a little.

Done.

All together, it took about an hour. Would have been a lot less if the halo and artifacts didn't need to be corrected first.

I think it looks okay "at 100%" or smaller... but not any larger.

Probably could do a better job working from the original or at least a larger version of this shot.

See what you think...

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lwerthe1mer Loc: Birmingham, Alabama

Attached for anyone who wants to practice making a mask is the original photo, before editing. Please share your efforts with the rest of us.

Attached file:
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