lsin

thank you

is this any better?

ok so how do i make it better? Bigger brush? higher/lower opacity? i used 5%

i was afraid you were going to ask that....my cloning is awful, im so bad at it.....but the tutorial says it doesnt need to be perfect as you will be hiding it....

Hi Damien, i tried using the softening hard shadows tutorial (http://www.damiensymonds.net/2010/03/softening-hard-shadows-method-1.html) to reduce the shadows under baby's nose due to awful overhead lighting, but i do not think it is working. How do i eliminate 2/3 of the shadow and leave just a nice soft shadow under the nose (which doesnt extend all the way down to baby's lips) or is this possible? I have attached my attempt (1st picture), SOOR and 100% crop of shadow area

Where abouts? I am in work now on work computer so cant really see. Should be easy enough to fix though, it was that bottom part under the basket with the shadows that i was mostly struggling with

brilliant! thank you! Will i be ok to go ahead and merge all these layers as the file size is huge?

Hi Damien. Does the extension of the rug under this basket look passable? I did not have seperate picture of just the rug filling the screen and do not have the rug with me so i used place-embed option with the SOOR picture to fill in the gaps in the canvas. Layers panel and SOOR attached SOOR

better?

now?

is this better?

here i have added the hue / saturation adjustment using same values you have used in your step by step guide Is it passable??

ok i tried replacing just the four corners again, i havent done any hue/saturation aajustment yet, how does this look?

How do you mean enlarged the sections? Is there any other method i could use to fix the background?

how is this? still not able to match colours exactly.can still see a ring around the basket where new and ol drug meet. i used a really large brush (pretty much size of basket)

here it is. as i meantioned in my post above. i tried to replace the full rug rather than the four corners and then mask off the areas for the natural shadows. I have done no other levels work yet as dont see the point until i fix background!

Hi Damien, i am really really struggling with this edit. When i try to place the 4 corners of the rug, i find it impossible to get blur / hue/saturation right and it looks silly with very obvious lines where the different colours are. When i try to replace the rug in its entirety, i cannot get shadows back to look realistic. Here is my attempt at replacing the entire rug and masking out the shadows in the original pic. as you can see there is huge colour difference in the bottom left hand corner. I have tried using dodge and burn to darken the area but nothing happens (is it because it is blank space underneath where i extended the canvas??) and when i use clone tool to clone the shadows down to the end of the picture, the clone tool does not do what i want it to do and selects areas that i do not want to clone... Please can you help (Again!!)??

Thanks Christina. I will try to remember this in future. It just seems like my point is always miles away from where i selected, even though i am trying to constantly resample. I will keep a closer eye in future So is my last attempt where i used the content aware acceptable?

ok, how about this? i googled the content aware fill tool and tried it (Again for first time...)

still looks terrible doesnt it?? i just cant seem to control the + sign which takes the sample... one minute its behind my curser, then it jumps to above it or below it or in front of it...

ok thanks for the pointers, how is this?

what can i do to make it perfect? really want to learn (besides getting it right in camera first time - which i hope to learn eventually too!)

thanks. so is my cloning in the above picture ok? can i move on with my levels work?

interesting, i did not know that about the plus sign. this made it a little easier for 2nd attempt. Is there an way to control the + sign or to stop it moving? is this a good idea or not? Here is my 2nd attempt, is it any good?