Re: [Gimp-user] Remove shine

[Gene Heskett <gheskett shentel net>]

On Saturday 20 August 2016 03:30:44 Steve Kinney wrote:

> On 08/20/2016 03:07 AM, David Holland wrote:
> > I take photos of wildlife and with beetles I have a lot of
> > reflection, is there an easy to remove this? IMG_8352beetle
>
> Hey David,
>
> The photo didn't make it through to the list, alas - posting the URL
> rather than a formatted link should bring it through.
>
> Just as a guess it sounds like you will need to "paint over" the
> unwanted reflestions in the images, replacing them with realistic
> textures and contours that fit into the surrounding image smoothly.
>
> Depending on the situation, resynthesizer tools like Heal Selection
> might be exactly what you want:  That particular filter samples the
> image around the selection, and uses the color, texture etc. of those
> pixels to smoothly fill the selection.  The Heal tool - a clone tool
> that does a similar trick to blend the cloned-in pixels with the
> existing ones - sometimes also comes in handy for removing smaller
> "visual clutter" from an image.
>
> These tools are available in the gimp-plugin-registry package on .deb
> family (and I would bet .rpm) repositories.  I'm not sure if it's in
> the Windows binary distribution or has to be downloaded separately.
>
> You might get different and/or better advice when we have seen your
> example image.
>
> :o)
>
> Steve
The specular reflections cn be spread out so the details won't get lost 
by carrying a big silver umbrella the flash is aimed into. With the 
umbrellas silver surface, the power of the flash will be more widely 
dispersed, and while you'll still see the gloss, it will be distributed 
over a much wider area, and not near as bright as it is using the bare 
flash, which is nearly a point source. Check in Popular Phography 
magazine for dealers who still actually service the photo arts.  They 
used to come in a wide variety of sizes, and one that opens to 3 or more 
foot diameter, with a tripod to position it and a pad to mount the flash 
to, should help give you a lot better image quality.

Too many times the image is overexposed and details lost when doing 
digital photography.

I used to do portraits with high contrast copy film developed in d-23 to 
lower the contrast, and was pleasantly amazed at the difference a pair 
of big umbrellas made, negatives miss-exposed by half a stop or more 
were still usable in the darkroom when making the prints. HCC film will 
display every failure of your cameras lens in glorious black and white, 
but if you get it right, you can count every hair and skin pore in a 
print you shot from 6 or 7 feet away. Doing my own color printing in the 
darkroom with chemical processes, I found it quite easy to make color 
prints that beat digital for sharpness by at least 50 times unless you 
spend several thousand just for the camera body.  Todays $200 digital 
camera is the box brownie of the 1940's, with a slightly better lens.

Sadly, that technology, and the precision art form it could do, has been 
destroyed by the nearly instant digital photography print.  Supplies for 
that method of taking a picture have dried up, and I read someplace, 
several years ago where Kodak had shut down the last film production 
line.  Fuji might still be making some but I haven't checked in 2 
decades. 

Mmmm, I guess I am showing my age aren't I?

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
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