Rosco's Dogged Genius

Rosco took this photo, at the end of September when we motored into the country east of town. 

Alas, one of the indisputable drawbacks of film fotography is that an otherwise nice picture can get ruined during the developing... in this case by a  bleeding rust-red rainbow stain covering the right edge and over the tower.

The easy solution, of course, would be to crop out the stained part of the picture.  But in this case, that would have unbalanced the composition, given that the cement silo served as kind of visual anchor on the right.  Sigh. Too bad.

But Roski said he liked the foto.  It was nothing stunning but it was pleasing enough and, most of all, he just liked it. I told him the surgery would take a lot of work but he said he was willing to do it and it was better than his overdue bonework anyways. So I pulled up a chair he could sit on next to me and said, "OK, you tell me what to do."

The rainbow stain on the right divided into three progressively darker bands and again into three horizontal segments corresponding to the sky, the tower and the ground. 

Starting with the lightest stain in the sky, Roski had me fiddle with the colour balance sliders until the colour matched the adjacent unaffected portion of sky  as nearly as possible.  We repeated the process for each of the bands until -- mirabilis dictu -- all three were very much the colour of the unstained portion of the sky.  To fine-tune the match, Rosco had me open up "curves" to lighten/brighten the purged segment just a tad.

However, film grain tends to be particularly visible in areas like skies and the colour adjusted segment was unduly smooth. Like skin grafts, it did not match the pores of the healthy skin.  So Rosco had me fiddle with "film grain" and when that did not quite work he said to add something called "Gaussian noise."  That seemed to work fairly well and when that was done, Rosco had me use the "clone stamp" tool to "dab" around the border between the two sections of sky. Basically the stamp is used to copy a patch of picture pixels  and then paste the pixel-pattern elsewhere.  This "dabbing" was done lightly and randomly so as to confuse and thereby unaccentuate the demarkation between the two segments. 

Rosco then directed the same process with respect to each of the remaining shades of the two other horizontal segments, although no clone dabbing was needed since there was no visible film grain to be matched.   

However, the sliver of trees to the very right of the foto did not lend itself very well to colour balancing because the segment was not an even approximately uniform colour. Although they were stained rust red, there were tiny patches of sky between the leaves and branches of the tree.  "Oh leave it," i said, "no one is going to really notice."

But Roski would have none of it. "Yes they will," he said, "even if they don't know it."  "So what do you want me to do?" i asked.  "Make it big," Rosco said.  So i magnified it up 300% or so. "Now what?"  Rosco put his paw on the dodge tool.  The dodge tool is a like a reverse pencil that lightens -- by degrees -- the pixels it touches; so that, in this case, with successive clicks, the rust red would become pink, then pale, then off-white or white.  Patch by patch Rosco directed the lightening up of bits of sky. When that was done he used the stamp tool to replace remaining bits of rust stained leaves with various shades of green.  

The picture was now surgically corrected.  However, because an ultra-violet filter was not used, the foto had an overall yellowish/reddish tint to it.  Normally this could be corrected with Photoshop's "auto color" and "auto level" tools.  But these could not be used so long as the stain was present because the stain would bias the auto-calculation.  Now that the stain was removed they could be used.

Rosco didn't like the results, however, and instead had me play around with the grey-balance tool which does the same type of color adjustment based on whatever color-point in the picture is selected to serve as the "base reference".  The end result was to remove the yellowish hue and bring out the greys and blues.

But this darkening had the effect of highlighting the contast between the original and the corrected portion of the sky.  To remedy this, Rosco had me select the entire sky portion of the picture and lighten it back up. This done, Rosco turned his head toward me displaying a pleased-with-himself look: <pant><pant><pant>

 

Although I think the grass to the right could stand a bit of "greening", Rosco says he wants to go to bed now.  

As a postscript, i might add that a week after Rosco took the picture, i ran into the owner of the barn while walking Nicki on the other side of town by Squalicum Mound.  The owner, Jim, is semi-retired and the barn houses about 20 heifers.

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