Thursday, August 28, 2008

Removing unwanted objects from photos


This lovely Saint Bernard is Sadie. Her human asked us to remove the car window from the original photo. I used the clone tool and of course the smudge tool to pull this off. I am happy with the results. The original photo had a lot going for it including high resolution and a lot of crisp detail.

When I first started Art Paw 10 years ago people did not really understand digital art at all. They would look at our canvas prints in disbelief when we told them it was ink on canvas and not oils. Today our clients are a lot more sophisticated about digital art and they often ask us to do challenging things like removing objects in the foreground such as the window. I have even had clients ask me to paint in tongues on closed mouthed dogs before, and I somehow made it work.

While people do understand that a lot is possible with digital art, I often think they still do not quite have their minds around how long it actually takes. Working out an issue like the window above can take me about an hour or so, and then I still have to spend several more hours on the fun part of color & paint strokes. I could charge more for tasks like this and yet the reality is I do not really mind the extra work because stuff like this makes me better at Photoshop.

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