PSE 3 test photo "Backscatter"

[DoubleDip]

Here is another photo that needs some editing help, I hope its more straight forward than the last tester I provided. The pictures are stricken with a common underwater illness, backscatter. I am having trouble figuring out how to edit a layer to remove the backscatter. In jelly 7 there is a blend of water color from dark to light but its not extreem. In jelly 2 a blob of plankton is in a multi-colored area that is also the main focal point of the picture, this seems to provide the most difficult editing problem. I guess my main question is do you have to select the paint brush and then go layer by layer, pixel by pixel, untill the photo is repaired? or is there a simpler method?

 

[alcina]

I am the world's slackest backscatter remover so I am sure others will come in with more advanced techniques.

I simply get the clone tool, make my image big and flail away Some areas might need a really big clone stamp and others a teeny one...sometimes this takes some trial and error.

Good luck!

 

[justleesa]

To get rid of backscatter I either use the cloning or the paintbrush tools. Works prett good

 

[PapaBob]

Lisa:

Not to distract from the thread, but I just reviewed your wedding album on Yahoo. Roger is a lucky guy! It was nice of Dee to manufacture some custom rags and for Alcina to make the trip from down under. I have never witnessed an underwater wedding but the pictures made me feel like I was present for yours. Congrats!


---Bob

 

[justleesa]

Thanks Bob, glad you liked the pictures! It was a very special day and to share it with Alcina was double great!!
The rags were the dot on the i and I still wear it as we are still newly weds another hats off to Dee!

 

[PapaBob]

DoubleDip:

I loaded your image into PSE3. The quick improvement method was to pick up the selection tool (brush with "ants" marching around the tip) and set it to mask mode. This let me paint the jelly to mask it (red overlay) which is perhaps the easiest way to make a selection with such an irregular object. Tentacles are hard and I did not do a very good job of selection with the time I had, but I hope you get the idea.

I then converted the mode back to selection. I saved the selection (Select>Save Selection) and called it "background" in case I wanted to go back and tweak it. I now had the "marching ants" around the boarder and the jelly meaning I had selected everything but the jelly. The mask showed a hard edge (I used a hard brush) so I did a selection feather (Select>Feather) at 3px.

First, I wanted to change the water color. I tried Hue/Saturation, but when this adjustment does not work well you get a lot of posterizaion (blotching and artifacts) what worked was to go into levels in the individual color channels. In the red and green channels I moved the shadow (far left slider) and gamma (middle slider) to the right which boosted the blue. I then did a final tweak with the middle slider in the blue channel.

Now that I had the color where I wanted it, I blurred the selection (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur) and set the radius just high enough to kill the backscatter. None of these adjustments affected the jelly because it had not been selected.

The jelly was nicely exposed. I inverted the selection (Select>Inverse) so now just the jelly was selected (marching ant around the jelly and not the boarder). In Levels I tweaked the midrange slider to darken the jelly a tad and make it blend in a little better.

This is the result. Hope you enjoy. If you need some help with the steps, let me know.

---Bob

 

[DoubleDip]

I appreciate the time and effort. I have been scrambling to get some photos together for my kids biology teacher. You know, I work on some complicated pieces of machinery, but for some reason I just cant get this program down.....wierd. Thanks again for all the help!

 

[Zebra mussel]

Did you try the healing brush tool. Ive had wonderful luck in a lot of situations.....but not all. This is my firdt plan of attack on backscatter.

 

[PapaBob]

Zebra:

The Healing Brush was a great addition in PSE. In PSCS you have a tool called the Patch Tool that I like better for cleaning up backscatter. The healing brush works nice if you have background detail you want to preserve and the backscatter is not too extensive. I like it a LOT better than the clone tool. In DD's image I was not interested in the background detail and wanted a quick fix for the backscatter problem, thus the blur filter.

If you have PS (6,7 or CS) check out Dan Brown's backscatter removal action YOU CAN FIND HERE. See the last post in the thread. It is fine surgery and if used properly preserves the image detail.

---Bob