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September 20, 2006

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To provide a good example that, to try to get the best shot possible, I take numerous pictures of a subject. Well, in this case, several subjects. 

The nighthawks were all flying around the parking lot lights that evening so I was able to capture numerous shots of them. Unfortunately, and of course from my angle, I was only able to get these shots from the ground, looking up.

Digital Editing Tip: "Masking Techniques"

I did get a few comments about yesterday's posting, and how it appeared to be "cut-out", (the bird in the bottom center of this image). Well, I would have to agree, they all looked that way, and I thought that myself after I looked at my images. But I was using a flash, and it was dark, so there was no background in the images whatsoever. Which actually did make it easy for the creation of this image. While a simple approach to cutting and pasting one object into another would be just to mask a square around the object and cut and paste it, I still like to use a "magic wand" approach. I click on the outside area of the image. Being all black, it masks everything but the bird. Then I invert the mask to give me a perfect mask of just the bird. That way I don't have to physically and tediously draw a mask all the way around my object. But before I copy my object I quite often like to adjust the mask around it, to give it a bit more smoothing, and not accidentally cut off part of my object. With different image editing programs you can often adjust these factors to get better results.

But masking with blank backgrounds usually makes it a great deal easier. As long as the background is considerably different than the subjects. Think of that "green screen" effect that they use in movies. When you use the automatic masking features of programs, they generally look for areas of similar color. So if your background is all green and the objects are various other colors, the mask will saturate the whole green area very easily. Then, if you invert, or flip the masked area, you will then have only the objects that are not the same color as the background. Of course it's never perfect and familiarizing yourself with the masking features of your software is very helpful.

Now some of you might be sitting there asking, "What the heck is a mask? and what are you talking about?" Well, to try to describe it simply, a mask is that funny outline area of an object when you highlight it. Most graphic editing programs give various different ways of using masks. But basically, you can highlight an area of an image and copy it. That piece of the image gets temporarily stored into the memory of your computer into a place called the clipboard. In "Windows" based systems, anything you copy on your computer is stored into this memory area, including text and other word processing material.

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