Gull - Before & After

[Brownbear]

Here is a gull shot that I like because of the position captured and the detail... Unfortunately I clipped the wing on the right hand side, just a wee bit, and it was a little crooked so I cropped the photo.

I realize that I have to stop clipping wings, but I would like to know if the crop makes the photo work, ie a good photo or not. Thank you.

[MrB]

Hello Christina - if this were my image, as there is so little of the gull clipped, I think I would prefer to add rather than subtract, e.g.-



Philip

[jcuknz]

There is another path for you in PSE and this is to increase canvas size copy the good wing tip and mirror it and paste it to fit the other wing and then clone sky to cover the increased canvas size.

If you want to get pickie and are afraid the viewer will spot what you did ... it would be possible to copy that stray single tip and when it is on another layer rotate it to match the other two tips ... more work and a little bit more complicated than what I did. I hope PSE permits you to use rotate and size controls on a single layer of a pack like PSP.

I knew I probably could do this so when in the field with another photographer standing on a pillar for HIS GOOD VIEW of the train I got one shot with the railcar further down the track and then the close shot I wanted. It was then a matter of bringing the first shot up in size to match the near shot ... made easier in PSP by being aable to adjust size as a percentage which I find easier to keep a track off and I might go +50%, undo, +45%, undo, +47% , a taker ... then comes the merging the edge of the insert which may take quite a bit of time.
The other tool I have used with Panoramics is to adjust the density of each layer individually so that the sky matches across the pano. You may find there is a little box reading 100% at the top of the layer palette which changes as you select each layer as active if you have adjusted one or more of them.

I also had a third frame which gave me more of the space below the bridge so it ended up quite a complicaated production

[AB26]

Amazing to see how you are improving. And whom so ever said it is about the photographer and not the equipment.............., would you agree?

[Brownbear]

Philip and Photo Nut,

Thank you for advising and taking the time to share your edits. I actually did try expanding the canvas as someone advised me of this trick just a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately my attempt at doing it did not turn out... my attempt include a spotty cloned sky and my attempt to add the wing tip was a total disaster.

Photo Nut, thank you for the detailed how to... I will be saving your how to for future reference when my editing skills are better.

[Brownbear]

Hi Andre,

Thank you. Yes, for me having a better camera and lens that grabs on to focus faster and sharper definitely makes photographing birds in flight a lot easier. While it was possible with my D80, I had to work ten times harder at it... Also far better iso performance which I'm delighted to see.

That said, I think it is about the photographer, BUT having a better camera and lens makes it far easier, especially if one uses their photos full size.

Amazing to see how you are improving. And whom so ever said it is about the photographer and not the equipment.............., would you agree?

[Cantab]

Hello Christina - if this were my image, as there is so little of the gull clipped, I think I would prefer to add rather than subtract, e.g.-



Philip

Philip, are you able to provide the details of what you did? I'd find that information very helpful. Thanks.

[MrB]

Philip, are you able to provide the details of what you did? I'd find that information very helpful. Thanks.

Bruce, firstly I see that you have LR and PS, and so there are probably several ways that you can achieve this type of edit with your powerful software; secondly I use PaintShop Pro to process images, and my editing is fairly simple as I don't yet understand the use of layers. However, the method I used seems to be very similar to that outlined by jcuknz above.

I copied and pasted the whole gull image onto a new slightly bigger blank image, leaving space on the right for the wing tip and extra sky. As the blue tones vary slightly across the frame, I used a clone brush (rather than the fill tool) to copy and paint the sky into the space. I selected and copied only the tip of the left wing, pasted it on the right, flipped it and rotated it a few degrees to line up with the front edge of the wing, and finally I zoomed in to move it into the correct position.

Hope that helps.

Philip

[Cantab]

Philip, thank you for the explanation. I'll have to look up how to flip an image but I've a good book on PS so I should be able to find the explanation there if the solution does not leap out at me from one of the drop down menus in PS.

[MrB]

Bruce, in different software flipping might be called reflect or mirror image. In PSP flip horizontal reflects left-right (and flip vertical reflects top-bottom).

Philip

[Mike Buckley]

flipped it and rotated it a few degrees to line up with the front edge of the wing, and finally I zoomed in to move it into the correct position.

Notice that those fine adjustments rendered a right wing tip that looks different, as should be the case, from the left wing tip. Though the treatment by jkunz is very nice, both wing tips appear as exact mirror images, which in reality I imagine would rarely happen, if ever.

[chauncey]

And that is where image transformation come into play.