Asher Kelman said:
Mary,
I have not any skill in lightzone. However, my understanding is that one can set a feather margin around the selctions. This is something one needs to do so that the area changed is not sharply defined. One can then add a gray color sampled from neighboring structures to fill that selected portion and then blend it back.
Yes, that it is how it works in LightZone. There is an inner and an outer region line. One does the feathering in the space between the two lines.
I didn't think to use the zoom function and get those spaces large enough to work with. So I had very tiny areas to deal with, and that's why my feathering wouldn't work.
Actually, I shouldn't have put the photo up, but should have continued trying to express my idea less crudely. But my interest in communicating with Ivan overwhelmed my good judgment.
However, I'd do this to just get one base layer. I would prefer to repair the defects in another layer in which I would clone the correct texture and tones from the adjacent seats so that the defects would be rebuilt. I might duplicate that repaired layer and blur it and blend this back slightly and then blend this back to the original layer.
I'm not sure whether or not LightZone has layers?
It has the equivalent of layers, in that one can stack the tools.
In fact, that's what I did. When one calls a new tool, the changes one has applied to the regions become a permanent layer. In the new tool, one can draw more regions, or one can apply that tool's changes to the entire image.
I have stacked up to thirty tools in LightZone. However, if I get too many, it will suddenly close without warning. I am running LZ 1.62, because I could not master the eyedropper in beta v. 2.0. I think this sudden closing defect has been corrected in the beta. But in v. 1.62, color management is attended to with sliders. And that's much easier for me.
Now I am not sure what the advantage of reducing the highlights on the boys face, as htey do not seem blown out on my monitor.
It's not that they were blown.
It's that after I did the crop--which was my first move--the background highlights jumped out even more brilliantly. And after I crudely painted over them, then the normal highlights on the boy's face jumped out.
I wanted him darkened a bit anyway, to emphasize the pensiveness of his look. To me he looks more pensive than bored. But I take his father's word for it that he was bored.
Anyway, to darken the image, I reduced the luminosity. LightZone has a blend menu, but selecting "darken" or even selecting "shadows" on it darkened the face too much. Also, wih the darken blend, the highlights contrasted with the rest of the face even more.
So, I backed the luminosity down. Then I used the Lighten choice from the blend menu, to counter-act the dullness that reducing the luminosity brought in.
The result is not much different, actually, from the boy's appearance in the uncropped picture. Somehow, cropping it changed my perception of the light and dark areas of the image, and that's why I did all the work I've described above.
Still, Mary, your final result is O.K. and I commend you for the large effort. There are few people I know who'd tackle this outside of PS!
Thank you for your praise, Asher.
I am moved to comment in reply to your last sentence, though, that we all know the old saying, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." < said with a smile >
Again, your subtle sharpening is in the right direction. At last, nothing pops out to attack me!
< Rolling On the Floor Laughing > I'm making an earnest effort to leave most of the sharpening and attacking activity to my two cats. LOL
Mary
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