Framing for Cloning

[Joe Copalman]

With the Pima shoot less than a week away, I thought it might be a good time to post a quick how-to on managing the clutter that photographers typically encounter at PASM.

Virtually every aircraft in the outside display areas will have at least two articles of clutter - a sign on a small post identifying the aircraft, and tie-down cables near the landing gear.  While in some cases, these objects make it impossible to get a clean shot without something obscuring part of the aircraft (most often the landing gear), more often than not, you can frame your shot in a way that makes it relatively easy to clone the offending objects out in Photoshop.  In other words, you deliberately take the shot with all the foreground junk in the frame, but with the intent of removing it in post-processing.

The following posts will be a series of before and after shots with a brief summary of the shot.  While most of these are examples of how to deal with foreground clutter, at least one deals with minimizing background clutter, which is a much bigger problem.  My hope is that since we'll be shooting at night, that much of the background clutter (mostly other aircraft) can be minimized through how we light our subjects.

The first set of images is a really simple scenario.  The sign was conveniently positioned in the middle of a large patch of dirt, and the tie-down cable was a simple clone job.  Some might not even find it distracting enough to warrant the effort of cloning it out, but it was an easy fix, so I spent the 60 or so seconds to clone it out.

[Joe Copalman]

Here's a very similar set-up on the E-1B Tracer.  The sign was off to the side like with the T-37 photo, but you'll notice that it almost breaches the shadow of one of the prop blades.  Had it actually eclipsed the shadow, I would have had to recreate the shadow, through cloning, and I know I would not have gotten it to look anywhere near as natural as it would have with the framing I actually went for.  The tie-down cable is the same deal as with the T-37 - not a deal-breaker, but easy enough to clone out to justify the effort.

[Joe Copalman]

This one was much trickier, and as you can see, I tackled not just the foreground clutter, but the background as well.  There are a few more things I can do to clean it up, but overall, I think the result is a much better image than the one I started with.

The sign obscured part of the wing's shadow, but being that the edge of the shadow behind it (the wing's leading edge) is a straight line, it was easy to clone by using the edge of the shadow as a guide.

I made things harder for myself by allowing the sign to breach the shadow line from the trailing edge, but again, as that shadow follows a straight line, it was much easier to clone out than if it had been curved at all.

The tie-down wires were a bit more difficult on this shot as well.  The one on the right was pretty easy, as the entire cable is in the shadow, so I just cloned bits of ground from nearby areas also in the shadow.  The one of the left bisects the steel matting, the cross-bar that goes through the hub, and the edge of the gear door's shadow.  While this wasn't all that difficult to clone out, it was more time consuming, as I had to use a much narrower brush size when cloning it out, especially on the steel matting. 

I initially didn't plan on cloning out the other aircraft and the 390th's hangar from the background, but the clouds in the background really made it easy to do with some wiggle room that I wouldn't have had with a clear blue sky.  For this, I masked off the portions of the aircraft in the areas I was going to be cloning into, then cloned mostly from the sky on the left side of the frame.

While this was a time-consuming edit job (about 15 minutes total), it still demonstrates how careful (or semi-careful, in this case) framing can give you the option to use the clone tool in Photoshop to greatly reduce the clutter in your shots.

[Jay Beckman]

Very nicely done Joe...

One thing I might suggest, insofar as our night shoot goes, be sure to "box the viewfinder" with your eye and look for extraneous light sources that might be present.  Joe did a nice job of laying out where we think the sodium vapors lurk as well as the lights under the Shuttle Pavilion but there will be folks moving around with work lights and others using flash.

For the former, you can probably see them before you shoot.  For the latter, post shot, I'd zoom in on the LCD and move around the image through all the edges and corners.