After last week shooting the band it was time to catch up with Sam and go through a couple of the photos before perhaps having a group review of each others’ work. The night before I had begun to compose a powerpoint slide deck of the progress of the project thus far.
This post will deal with the editing of a couple of photos, an official meeting and then the powerpoint slides.
First up, I fired up the mac in the studio area and opened up the Lightroom CC application. In here were the photos that I uploaded to the OneDrive and imported to the library catalog, some of which I’d already edited and shared with the Wooden Dog crew.
Sam had discussed with me a couple of photos that could be edited to remove the lines of the boards in the background so I gave it a go.
You can see in the two photos before, the first before editing and the second post production. In the top most photo you can see the lines where the boards are joining together travelling top to bottom where each of the picture frames and clock are. Using the Adobe Photoshop tool “generative fill” I selected the areas to change with a selection box or painted selection. Once the area is selected the generative fill can be run to remove the items of interest leaving behind a few versions that I can then check through to see the best option.
The floor in the original photo is also very grubby, as the white floor of the scoop is getting tired after a half year of work. Marks from trainers and shoes as well as wheell marks from lighting stands and chairs etc. To remove these I could select the areas I wanted to clear up and do a generative fill. The first time I did this I tried typing in the generative fill text entry box “tidy up floor” and the first suggestion it gave me was a lovely green rug on the floor covering up the marks. That’s onw way of doing it I suppose.
You can see that most of the photo is left alone, apart from having a little bit of change to curves to brighten up and make the image a little less flat. Around the base of the walls also has had a change, this was done using a clone stamp tool with a large brush and low flow and opacity settings. I didn’t remove the bottom of the wall entirely but merely softened the hard lines a little. It was quite a challenge of perseverance to go through the areas of the photo with the clone stamp tool tidying up small marks and blemishes.
Once I’d done with this image I moved on to the other that we were to play with. This is a slightly wider shot showing them sitting around on a sofa with Ben the drummer on a chair and Drewe the bassist sat on the floor. This is a lovely image also and one that the band immediately snapped up once they’d seen it on the Instagram post. It’s the mixture of people sat in different poses and all tied together with the set.
Underneath is the original photo, before the editing that can be seen directly above. You can see the cleanup of the floor, including the spare dominoes, the dirty floor, the lines on the walls that lead to each of the pictures and clock. It’s a bit lighter too to pull out some more detail and to help them pop a little. To do this pop, I lift the middle of the curve up a little to bring up the midtones.
Whilst I appreciate the lines disappearing makes a difference, my editing skills are not accomplished enough to do a good job on removing the features. If you look at the picture above, sure, the lines have mostly gone, but if you you look carefully you can see some artifacts from where I brushed out the components and ith has created some messed up areas. The bit above the lamp shade stands out to me as a particularly damaged area of the photo.
Editing these photos is challenging, I’m not used to Photoshop manipulations and a lot of tidying up. I may occasioanlly use Photoshop or Lightroom to edit a picture to pick out some spots or an odd pigeon but never anything in these sort of environments.
I find the interface of Adobe software easy enough and I’m no slouch on applications in general but I find myself going too far on som edits. A good example is the edits I made in the Photoshop exercise early on this year with Sam where I went a bit heavy on the changes we needed to work on. You might be able to see int he image below, which is a screenshot of part of the edited image. You can see the vertical shadow in the corner of the wall above to the right of the lamp shade is gone. It is replaced by a big block of blurred out colours. If I was to re-edit this work I would be a little more careful with this shadowy section.
I still have to go through some of the other images and pick out a couple to edit further, then share with the band.
Not easy but hopefully if I get to edit a few images I might improve. We shall see.
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