Now You See It, Now You Don't!
For this week's blog I thought we could delve into object removal. My goal when photographing is to keep distracting elements, such as objects in the background, out of the photo but sometimes that isn't always possible. Imagine being out at the lake photographing an eagle as it begins diving for a fish. When you look at your shots, the best shot of the bird is right when it flew in front of a distant boat. The likelihood of a second chance recreating that shot is marginal (read: not going to happen) so removing the boat in post becomes the best option. "Post" if you are not familiar with the term, is short for "post-processing" which refers to editing the image on the computer.
There are other items that may be removed when editing the image. For example, dust specks on the image from dust on the camera lens, facial imperfections, even a branch or sign appearing to come out of a subject's head. There are all kinds of things a photographer might want to remove from a photo.
For my example photos, I borrowed my son Austin. A few years ago, he was all about baseball. He even attended a Mariner's hosted baseball camp one summer. Austin decided he was more interested in other sports, but he still has his mitt. The bat is my bat from when I was a kid (can you believe that?). :)
We went out to our front yard. On the other side of the bushes is a main road so compositionally, I positioned myself to hide the road. For sports photos, I like to get down a little lower than the subject, to create a larger-than-life look to the image but there was no way to hide the street lamp behind him while obscuring the road and maintaining the look I was after. They made be hard to see, but there are dust spots all over the photo too as I decided not to clean the lens. Austin liked the look of his face even though there are a couple faint pimples. He felt they added to the "grit" of the image so I did not remove them.
Both the first and second photos have been edited. The brightness of the images was adjusted, same for the overall color but, the objects mentioned above (dust and lamp) are still in the first photo.
Now take a look at the second photo. Here, I removed the lamp, the dust spots, and added a bit of brightness to the clouds but a little darkness to some of the blue areas of the sky. I brightened Austin's eyes just a little.
You can really see a difference in the image! In the first photo, Austin is competing with the lamp post for the viewer's attention. In the second photo, there is no competition. It is all about Austin. Darkening the sky and brightening his eyes, are more subtle changes, but all help to enhance the photo.
Now you can see how removing objects can completely change a photograph. From my position as a photographer, I am amazed how the capabilities of editing software keep getting better with each version. For your next session, let's discuss how object removal can benefit your photos, to make them even better!
To set up your next photo session with me, please contact me here.
