Re: filmscanners: Yo Tokyo

[soho <soho@eircom.net>]

> On Thu, 15 Mar 2001 12:46:43 -0800  Hersch Nitikman (hersch@silcom.com) wrote:
> 
>> Tony, I am intrigued by your last sentence, about balancing the sky areas.
>> I have some elderly images that have faded with a distinct horizontal
>> gradient. Since they were precious images of my first visit to the UK, I
>> would like to be able to take out that gradient better than I managed last
>> night. I'd like a little coaching on that score, especially if something
>> like that was your problem.

Hersch

I've used gradient masks quite a lot recently to simulate depth of field by
blurring through the mask. I work as a graphic designer and am not much of a
photographer really, but recently a client spotted some epson prints of a
series of sculptures on my desk I shot around Ennis Co. Clare. He was
impressed enough to mention it to the County Librarian who had commissioned
the sculptures. Subsequently I was asked if I would be interested in
providing a complete set of 14 photographs, of course I agreed and was paid
£1100 for a scanned set on CD. I think if it were not for Ed's Vuescan I
never would have achieved such excellent scans, so thanks Ed.

Anyway, most of the sculptures had distracting backgrounds, so I worked in
PS blurring out the backgrounds through a gradient mask.

Firstly I isolated the sculpture by drawing around it with the pen tool and
converted the vector to a mask. I then loaded the mask and copied the
sculpture, pasted in a new layer and switched it off. Then I when back to
the original layer and cloned the surrounding area into the sculpture from
all angles. This would allow me to blur the image without the sculpture
blurring outside its boundary and creating a halo. I then marquee selected
two thirds of the image from the top down and set feather to 200pixels and
blurred the image. The idea was to gradually blur the paved area and fully
blur the background. I don¹t know if this procedure will help you but it's
certainly possible to apply a number of filters though a gradient mask to
remove colour casts etc. I've done it myself to bring a sky down by a few
stops. 

If you place one of the images up on the web I'm sure someone will provide
the answer for you.

Good luck

Richard