Fly in the Ointment
- This topic has 3 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated Sep 2, 2008 at 2:06 pm by
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I am just starting to experiment with macro photography for photographing my flies. I would appreciate your comments on the photos (comments on my fly tying technique will be taken offline and outside, ha).
How can I get rid of the hook holder? Would you just leave it in place for a more traditional How-To shot? I tried masking in photoshop but it just leaves a dead space. The healing brush leaves an obvious blur line. Zach, your method of blowing out the background and then doing post processing in photoshop works great for objects sitting on a table but here I still have to deal with the hook grabber.
WOW Neal, there are some really good shots in there!
Hope you don’t mind, in order to answer your question, about removing the hook holder, I down loaded the image and removed it myself first. There are many ways to skin this cat but the easiest was: Cut the hook holder out of the image. Place a fill layer underneath and flatten the image. Duplicate the new image and start blending the empty space back in with the clone brush. Change the hardness when you are on the hook, fibers or close to them as you want to keep the natural feathered look alive with no hard edges. After you have the empty space filled back in and the shade blending close, use the healing brush sampled from the clean areas.
You can also get into masking layers and painting but I think this might be the easiest solution for web posted images 🙂
This is a very good shot!!
P.S. I almost forgot, instead of using the Radio Shack hackle pliers :), a small twig cut at a 45 degree angle makes for a very pleasing holder for fly photography.
Another way to remove what is holding the fly is something Chad Sincox showed us a while back. Hang it from mono filament, which makes retouch minimal. You might feel like you shot it upside down but the end viewer will never know.
I love the shots.
Along side with cloning which you might see some patterns emerge – try playing with the healing brush in photoshop. It combines cloning with some sort of mathematical blending and it does backgrounds much cleaner. Recreating the hook can be a bear.
Do you have an example of the dead spaces you were talking about with the masking and healing brush? I can work you through that without any issues. We might need to soften the brushes a little but it is hard to say without an example. I havent been behind the computer as much but if you send me an email we can look at it.
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