Editing background

[kas]

I am looking for advice on a good package for editing the background for photographs, if one is available.
I have always struggled to get good photographs of our dog. Then one day whilst waiting in a supermarket carpark I got these lovely shots of him. The only thing is the background, eg the car door and painted lines on the ground. I would love to be able to remove these .
Sorry if this is easy to do, but I am only a beginner.
Many Thanks Kas

[Jon Sharp]

Hi Kas - this depends on your budget to some extent. I started out using a microsoft built in Photo Editor (this struggles with large files) - which I think was bundled with Windows 2000 onwards.
I then used a product called Photo Impact which came free with a photo magazine. I believe the older version of this software are still downloadable free - just the latest version (10?) which still costs. This has a built in photo album to organise your pictures which I also found useful then.

Take a look at this picture it was edited using Photo Impact. http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...500&ppuser=818

There are numerous others - if your PC is recent it may have even been bundled with Microsoft other photo editing suite. I can't recall it's name.

Other packages which rate very highly are Photoshop - one you'll probably here the most about and is available in several versions, agan depending on pocket and Paint Shop Pro formerly by JASC now owned by Corel.

All these packages contain a feature which enables you to edit the background, usually by picking a colour, i.e. in your photo the grey of the road, and having the software look for all pixels containing that colour and removing it. It's a bit more involved than that but essentially that's how it works.

Most of these packages explain some of the functionality within their respective 'Help' menus.

I'm sure once you've sorted a package that suits you and you repost any specific questions here about it you'll get a host of responses.

Jon

[Adey Baker]

Most editing programmes will contain a 'clone' tool with which you can copy one part of an image and put it somewhere else. You can vary the size of the area you're copying so you can either do a big 'rough' job or a more detailed one using just small areas at a time selecting different areas to clone from to avoid making a repetitive 'pattern' appearing.

I've done a quick 'rough' one here so you can see what I've done - but I've also blurred the uninteresting road a bit and sharpened the dog to make it stand out more - again, I've 'over-cooked' it so you can see what's changed. You can do a much more subtle version so that it doesn't look as if anything has been touched on it.

I've used the 'magnetic Lasso' tool in 'Photoshop' to draw around the dog, then gone to 'select>inverse' which has selected the background where I've applied a generous amount of 'Gaussian blur' (Filter>blur>Gaussian blur). Going back to 'inverse' again, I've then applied 'unsharp mask' to just the dog.

You can see what I've done but, as I remarked, by using subtlety a photo will look quite natural without anyone suspecting anything has been altered!

[kas]

Thanks Jon and Adey.
I will look into this.
Adey, what a good job on editing the picture. This is exactly what I wanted.Thanks.

Kas

[Snowyowl]

Hmm! Very nice job. I think that I'll try to do something similar with the picture of my dog that I posted in My Pictures. I don't like the busy background in it.

[Snowyowl]

I played around using the technique that you described. With a very hairy dog it is tough to get a nice blend beween the blurred background and the dog. Here's what I came up with and I was reasonably plesed. Thanks for the tip.

[Snowyowl]

I did this one in layers using Exract. I think it is pretty neat. I think that with practise and a lesser hairy subject, a person could create some pretty interesting pictures.