airbrushing

[herbiehysteria]

hi guys
is there an airbrush tool in xara which i can use to delete out minor imperfections in a photo?
regards
HH

[Egg Bramhill]

Not as such HH, but you can always clone the photo, draw a circle over a similar part of the photo, select the circle and the cloned photo and Arrange / Combine Shapes / Intersect shapes. Apply feathering and move it over the imperfection.

Have a look at the attachment.

[David O'Neil]

I hope you don't mind, Egg. Here's another way to do a quick touch-up on that same picture using only a transparent object to suck the purple out of the spot. Of course, it only works if you have a solid color blemish, but in some situations it may be an acceptable solution.

If the blemish is a scratch or something else that is small, and that occurs throughout a relatively solid-color area, you can sometimes use a blend between two objects to fix it. I don't have a quick example, but if you post a pic with such a blemish, I'll try to 'examplify' it.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi David,

That's fiendishly clever. I've never seen a practical use for the Hue transparency before and I'm still not 100% sure how your example works. It would be great if you could supply further examples.

[David O'Neil]

I don't have more examples, it is just a matter of playing around with the transparency types using various colors, and seeing what works. For instance, changing the circle to a color of 0700ff, and its transparency type to flat, saturation, 0% also gives a somewhat acceptable result. If you don't change the file I posted, and then clone the circle, make the clone a color of c78a53, and give it a flat bleach transparency of 72%, some of the artifact I mentioned in the first post is eliminated.

I think the basic effect has to do with complementary and contrasting colors, but I've never really studied color theory. For me, it is just a matter of playing around until it is acceptable. Also, note that I don't think it will work if you have multiple colors in one area that you want to hide--it may be possible, but would probably require several small objects over each individual color spot, and be quite difficult.

As far as a practical use for hue transparency, check out minimiro's chair example posts in this thread. It opened my eyes to the power of hue transparency, as I did not understand it earlier. Thank you minimiro!

David

[Egg Bramhill]

Cheers David, I missed that thread altogether. I'll need to look into this further.

[Egg Bramhill]

Brilliant! Thanks for the links Dave.

[iamtheblues]

Using the techniques mentioned in this thread, I was able to change the original photo (top) by removing the detracting object from the grass, and colourising the house walls, thatch and sky. Time spent: 15 minutes. It would improve with more time given to it.
It has a faked look to it, because the colours have a pastel feel to them because of the transparencies applied, but the cloning out with the grass works very well. Not bad at all for a vector program.
Saludos,
Bob.

[Rock]

You can get rid of that "faked" look by taking a second identical transparency and fading from a 20 or 30 percent back to transparent to add some natural looking shadows say under the roof going down or away from your natural light source.

I have taken photos with wrinkles in the neck, made a copy, cropped the area nearest the wrinkle, stretch it to cover the wrinkle, added transparency, and feathered it and it did a great job covering it up and making it look pretty natural.

I've eliminated pimples, whitened teeth, changed eye color, added tans, and several similar things very simply using cropping, transparencies, and feathering without ever getting to know my airbrush tool (which wants to stay purple no matter what color line I select where I have to change each line afterwards! GRRRR! Don't make me RTFM!).

Rock