It's been a little while since my last post as work has kept me away from the PC in the evenings. However I'm finally back at the computer, for a while at least.
Back in September I was honoured to be asked to take the photographs at my Nephews wedding. It was an afternoon wedding and thankfully we were very lucky with the weather especially as the weather leading up to the event had been dire.
Everything was going well and I'd managed to shoot the pre-wedding shots, the shots during the service and the majority of the shots outside the registry office. I'd got most of my planned shots in the bag and was wandering around getting some impromptu shots of the guests chatting when one of the bridesmaids approached me to ask if I was going to take a shot of the confetti being thrown. Luckily it was on my list of vitally important shots and I was watching the bride and groom for signals that they were about to leave and head for the reception.
Suddenly the bridesmaid shouted "confetti" and the guests began to cover the bride and groom. I raised my camera and pressed the shutter, When I looked at the monitor I was horrified to find that the bridesmaid's hand was right across the shot.
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| Ruined image |
I was gutted. It was a one off shot and it had been ruined. What to do? The day continued and I continued to shoot the reception and evening reception.
I got the images into the computer and decided to see if I could salvage that 'confetti' shot. As I looked through the other images I realised I'd got a shot of the bride and groom a few seconds prior to the confetti being thrown and a plan began to formulate.
I dragged the damaged image and the image taken a few seconds earlier into Photoshop and made a selection of the left hand side of my Nephews body. I dragged the selection on to the damaged image and started work.
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| First Stage |
By dropping the opacity of the layer with the body in it I very carefully positioned the selection over the body underneath using the move tool. I created a new layer and began carefully
feathering the edge of the selection using the eraser. I also performed some careful cloning and healing until it was no longer obvious that the selection belonged to a different image.
I used a levels adjustment to match the grey in the selection with the grey of the original jacket. I cloned out the rest of the offending hand and wrist and copied a few pieces of confetti to place around the image.
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| Second Stage |
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| Final Image |
Above is the final image. Not too bad if I do say so myself. See you next post.
