Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

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axe9
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p.1 #1 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Hello there all. First post in this section of the board.

It was recently my honor to bear witness to a good friend of mine proposing to his girlfriend at the foot of the Eiffel tower.

However, I was unaware it was going to happen, so the settings on the camera were all sorts of screwed up, so in my haste to capture the moment, I was poorly positioned, I over exposed the image, and shot it at 1600ISO (I'd just come from the Louvre before, and it was dim).

I would like to print a large version of this picture to give it to them on their wedding day.

However my photoshop skills are no where near up to par for an image of this sort. So if anyone out there could indulge me and help me with this image. I could greatly appreciate it!

This is the original image (click for full size)

This is a sample image of the Eiffel Tower (click for full size)

What I would like to do is get rid of the tower in the original, and reposition the one from the sample between them (obviously so it looks natural). Crop out the girl in the yellow shirt, and over all, get it to a decent condition so it can be printed (I was thinking an 8x10)

All my hours of working on this, I haven't produced a single decent version of this. So if anyone could find some time to help me out, I would forever be indebted to them!

Edited on Jul 02, 2009 at 12:26 PM · View previous versions

Jul 02, 2009 at 04:18 AM

UCSB
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p.1 #2 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Welcome to the board ... I had shutdown my graphics workstation for the day ... so I produced this rough draft on my notebook computer. It is only a partially completed piece to show the possibilities. It lacks a noise reduction step and some key retouching steps; masking could use more work in a final piece. Getting a final wedding gift quality image from these originals would require some work. To tie the couple into the scene, I used the black individual observing the couple ... do you think this ties it together or just creates a distraction (should have gotten rid of the photographers arm ... opps)? My crop may be a little off center ... no problem because I was using hide in the crop tool and can still recenter it because I didn't actually crop any pixels. Felt the softer light was more romantic ... but, others may disagree. No sharpening applied.

This image is copyrighted by the owner

A few tweaks.

This image is copyrighted by the owner

You might want to take a moment and clean your camera's sensor.

Jul 02, 2009 at 08:31 AM

rhyder
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p.1 #3 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

So...you were naked during the proposal? or do you mean bear?

Jul 02, 2009 at 12:10 PM

matonanjin
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p.1 #4 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

rhyder wrote:
So...you were naked during the proposal? or do you mean bear?

There's always one!

Jul 02, 2009 at 02:27 PM

paulhodson
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p.1 #5 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

I have done a full size version - PM me with your email address if you would like the full size file.

2008 © paulhodson

Jul 02, 2009 at 04:20 PM

CircleMGraphic
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p.1 #6 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Just a minor tweak to UCSB's job, which is excellent for a rough draft.

If your able to put the tower anywhere you like, try placing it behind the guy. Looks too awkward with it between them. You want to capture the moment of them looking at each other, rather them both looking at a tower. Just my $0.02. Still great PP work.

Jul 02, 2009 at 05:41 PM

paulhodson
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p.1 #7 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

CircleMGraphic wrote:
Just a minor tweak to UCSB's job, which is excellent for a rough draft.

If your able to put the tower anywhere you like, try placing it behind the guy. Looks too awkward with it between them. You want to capture the moment of them looking at each other, rather them both looking at a tower. Just my $0.02. Still great PP work.

But that's where it started!

he asked for "get rid of the tower in the original, and reposition the one from the sample between them"

Jul 02, 2009 at 06:00 PM

CircleMGraphic
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p.1 #8 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

paulhodson wrote:

But that's where it started!

he asked for "get rid of the tower in the original, and reposition the one from the sample between them"

Ahhhh.... touche. Didn't see that part. The customer's always right!

Jul 02, 2009 at 06:36 PM

Weiyang Liu
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p.1 #9 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

excellent photoshop guys!

Jul 02, 2009 at 06:37 PM

mdude85
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p.1 #10 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Forget trying to superimpose the couple onto the second image (the guy in the green shirt is very distracting). The original image is actually much more conducive to bringing attention to the subjects, so modify it.

Editing this photo is actually quite easy. First you will need to clone out the girl in the yellow shirt. Cloning in the portions where she is blocking the sky and ground are easy. But she is blocking some people and they will need to be cloned back in as well. So probably I would take some people from the second shot, cut them out, insert them into the first shot and resize them according to the distance of the original people from your camera. Then blend them in with the lighting.

You will also need to remove the shadows on the girl's pants. There are a lot of ways to do this - you can just google shadow removal in photoshop.

As for the Eiffel Tower, you can just use the one from the second photoand clone out the one from the first photo.

The big mistake here would be to remove the people from the first shot and replace them with the people from the second shot. The people from the second shot are closer and much more distracting, even if the Tower is in the middle. You're better off just keeping the original image and superimposing the Tower from the second image.

I'm not sure if blurring the background would look good on this photo, but it might be worth a shot.

Jul 02, 2009 at 06:37 PM

UCSB
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p.1 #11 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Good suggestion on the distracting neon green shirt ... also brought down the red top on the woman on the left.

Paul, a couple of differences between our images. I applied a photo filter adjustment layer with a warming filter to soften the light and match background. I applied it only to the couple. One other difference, I rotated the image very slightly to align ground/tower (.93 degree) ... that caused a crop and removed the very lowest portion of the image (horizontal paving). I applied a vignette and then increased brightness using curves trying to bring a small amount of focus on to the couple. I'm not sure how/if you applied any noise reduction in the full size image, but I applied a dust/scratches smart filter layer to the sky. Selected sky using the color range command. If I was working on my main computer, I probably would have used NIK Dfine. I was shooting for more of a muted overall image and brought the exposure down on the couple with a curves adjustment layer. Thanks for creating a finished image for the OP ... the OP can use any of these ideas if he wants.

Jul 02, 2009 at 07:56 PM

axe9
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p.1 #12 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Thanks UCSB! That's pretty much exactly how I envisioned it.

I'm still learning how to use the magnetic lasso tool, how did you get it to snap to the couple so cleanly to put them in the sample image? If I would have been able to figure that out, the other post work isn't so bad.
edit:
Friend of mine talked me through some of it, and helped in other bigs. And I hit it with noiseNinja.
Opinions?
New Image(Cause I just got off work and am feeling too lazy to resize)

Jul 02, 2009 at 10:36 PM

paulhodson
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p.1 #13 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

UCSB wrote:
I'm not sure how/if you applied any noise reduction in the full size image, but I applied a dust/scratches smart filter layer to the sky. Thanks for creating a finished image for the OP ... the OP can use any of these ideas if he wants.

Yes - I used Neat Image on the sky.

Jul 02, 2009 at 10:41 PM

UCSB
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p.1 #14 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

axe9 wrote:
Thanks UCSB! That's pretty much exactly how I envisioned it.

I'm still learning how to use the magnetic lasso tool, how did you get it to snap to the couple so cleanly to put them in the sample image? If I would have been able to figure that out, the other post work isn't so bad.
edit:
Friend of mine talked me through some of it, and helped in other bigs. And I hit it with noiseNinja.
Opinions?
New Image(Cause I just got off work and am feeling too lazy to resize)

I used a few masking approaches to pull the couple out of the original image. Delicate parts of the couple, I pulled out using a one of the RGB alpha channels as the basis for my mask ... but, also used the quick selection tool / quick mask mode for easy areas. The most important tip I can give you is that you can refine the edges of your selection with the refine edge command. This allows you great control over your edges and the appearance of your finished work. Deke McClelland has a 'Channels and Masks' class over at lynda.com that goes into incredible detail on doing work like this.

Since you have multiple images from the shoot, you can do some amazing work using Photoshop's align image command to align and blend multiple images to pull people out of the image if required.

I'm sure the couple will enjoy your final image.

Jul 03, 2009 at 12:01 AM

mdude85
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p.1 #15 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Nice edit Axe!

Jul 06, 2009 at 01:00 AM

axe9
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p.1 #16 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

Sorry for the late reply. I've been over my head at work.
Thanks to everyone for the input

And thanks to UCSB for his special attentions. I really appreciate you going over your process with me.

Jul 08, 2009 at 01:06 AM

UCSB
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p.1 #17 · Please help! Photo editing beyond my abilities.

You're welcome ... I was running a batch of images with a slight glow, B&W, tint and frame the other day and put your image into the batch ... I like the look.