The Camera Never Lies *big*
Discussion
nice one!
stuh said:
Wow, that's fantastic!
Any chance of a little tutorial on how you did it?
i'm not sure if this was directed at me or not...
if it was, there's not an awful lot I can say. As you can see from the progression to begin with I basically just got rid of the bridesmaid by crudely clone stamping over her. I do this as it gives a sort of blank canvas to then work from. A critcal thing at this point is to get the borders looking good - on the right hand side its down the bride's flank, on the left it is around the round pattern on the floor. I think I just used the polygonal lasso tool on the right hand side with a bit of feather. On the left I used the pen tool to get a smooth curve path. Once you have these borders done as a selection you just clone stamp up to the edges. Now the tricky thing is to get the floor blended correctly. This just takes a bit of fiddling with the clone stamp, and very importantly the healing brush tool (you will struggle to do thi pic without PS7 or higher). Using these tools at varying opacities is very useful too. If you look at the black bars going across at the top of the photo you will see they are totally straight - this is important because the eye sees them easily if they are wrong. Luckily it is easy to get the straight - you ust have to make sure the source point for your clone is in the right place, then you just go straight across and it makes itself. this will leave repeating patterns which need to be removed by doing more blending type of work. Again, the healing brush in different opacties is useful. You have to be careful though when using middle opacities - if you do it with surfaces that have detail you can sometiems just makes them look blurred, which isn't very good.
Probably the most difficult bit of the job was the bridesmaid's head, as you can just clone and blend in, I had to make up whole bits of door, road, fence, pillar etc. In these situations you just have to be creative and make use of what you have. as you can see what I have drawn is obviously not what is actually there, although if you hadn't seen the original picture you wouldn't notice.
Once you've done all of that it will take a while to put on the finishing touches. On bits like around the round bit of marble, you have to zoom out and take a look, then zoom in to make small changes, then zoom back out etc until you are happy. The Burn tool (and occasioanlly dodge tool) can be exceptionally useful here - the day I discovered this was a happy one!
Key to making it look convincing are getting rid of obviously repeating patterns - the sure sign of a clone tool. This picture is definately not perfect in this respect, as LongQ pointed out the reflections at the top are not right, although TBH most people would never notice that. I was a bit bored by the time I had got to that stage - 2 hours on one photo gets tiresome!
I guess there was a bit to say after all
>> Edited by dcw@pr on Monday 9th May 23:07
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