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To fade background or colour fill?

M

Martin Evans

New member
This is my first experiment with manipulation of a digital image. Does it work?

tiller.jpg


While in the maritime museum in Chania, Crete, I saw this delightful carved tiller on display. This excellent museum, incidentally, seems to have no restrictions on photography. The tiller was displayed against a cluttered background of museum cupboards and cabinets, with a very poor contrast in places. I have Paintshop Pro on my computer, and it seems to offer many of the image manipulation tools that Photoshop has, so I made a manual freehand selection of the tiller, inverted it, and used the Flood tool to fade out much of the background.

Do members think that this works? I also tried the Flood tool to fill the background with an opaque, though pale, colour. I did not like the effect so much, as it leaves the tiller completely disembodied in blank space, with no sense of scale.

My camera, as a digital beginner, is a Canon A620. I like many of its features, but it does have limitations for serious photography. This image was taken at ISO200 (beginning to show a bit of noise) 1/10 sec at f/3.5, zoom at 14.9 mm.

Martin
 
Cem_Usakligil

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Martin Evans said:
This is my first experiment with manipulation of a digital image. Does it work?
Click to expand...
Hi Martin,

What exactly are you trying to achieve with this post processing, what is your goal? If you can tell us that, we can then comment whether it has been successful or not.

Cheers,
 
M

Martin Evans

New member
Thanks, Cem, for your fast response.

I am not attempting 'Art' photography. I have no talent in that field at all.

What I would like to do is to use the facilities open to digital images to extract the details of things seen in museum galleries, so that viewers can focus on the object, more or less free from the background clutter in those cases when one has to take the photo in situ. I see it as a form of technical photography. Is it better to leave some faded background, to orient the image in space, or to blank it out completely?

Thanks,

Martin
 
Asher Kelman

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
;94682 said:
This is my first experiment with manipulation of a digital image. Does it work?

tiller.jpg


Martin Evans: Tiller - Chania, Crete​


Martin,

An excellent question. I love to drop out backgrounds and provide simplicity and clarity.

Don't even begin to worry about you camera. anything over 3 MP is fine for a lot of work folk do. Here you have imaged the arm well. Excluding ideas on "Art" whatever that might be, here one wants clarity. I'd drop out the background. Today one can do that simply enough by the edge selection techniques you already used and then more specific methods going from Photoshop extract tool or using a colored b.g. and a specialized program. Obviously in a museum one cannot bring a whole blue screen on set up ideal lighting. However, for this example, the edge is so specifically different you can easily drop out the b.g. and put white or black and it will look best.

If however, you want to be artistic, you might use a lens with a wide aperture and then when you focus on the museum exhibit, the b.g. will be blurred out. This has an advantage, as in the old but restored Getty Museum on Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles, the sculptures are set in a reconstructed Roman house and the room has exquisite marble floors and columns as well as alabaster windows. There it's obvious that having the b.g. preserved but gently blurred would be an option worth considering.

Asher
Click to expand...
 
Cem_Usakligil

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Martin Evans said:
Thanks, Cem, for your fast response.

I am not attempting 'Art' photography. I have no talent in that field at all.

What I would like to do is to use the facilities open to digital images to extract the details of things seen in museum galleries, so that viewers can focus on the object, more or less free from the background clutter in those cases when one has to take the photo in situ. I see it as a form of technical photography. Is it better to leave some faded background, to orient the image in space, or to blank it out completely?

Thanks,

Martin
Click to expand...
Hi Martin,

Thanks for the explanation, it makes better sense now to me :). If the sense of scale is not essential, I would suggest blanking out the background as the better option, but your selection must be very good. If you have edges which are not selected perfectly, this may stick out like a sore thumb. If you want the sense of scale, then you can typically blur and/or desaturate the background and at the same time adjust the brightness too until it starts to look right.

Re. the picture you have shown here, the sense of scale is not immediately clear even though we see the background. I guess this is because I don't know what exactly I am looking at and the composition does not provide any clues as to where that long arm-like wood comes from? Is it attached to something and if so what is that thing? Sometimes you have to include some contextual elements in your picture to make sure that we all get it immediately. Choose your perspective wisely (i.e. from which vantage point do you take the picture) and decide how much to include in the picture (e.g. by zooming in or out). That will give you a better composition to start with. It is just a matter of practicing and it will eventually become second nature.

I hope that this helps?

Cheers,
 
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