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Question

Ideas to speed up this workflow

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 15, 2024
3 replies
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Hi everyone,

I have a specific retouching workflow that I have to do quite regularly for 20-40 images. I'm looking for any ideas to help speed it up. I'm attaching an example image below which is quite typical - very simple flatlays of printed objects / books etc , with a soft shadow. I find a spend a lot of time doing these two things:

1) clean up - often I have to deal with dust and marks on the background and on dark or shiny surfaces. I find the dust and scratches filter ok on lighter areas sometimes, but pretty messy on other areas. This means I end up doing a lot of healing brush work at about 100% which takes a long time.

2) selection - every object has to be selected accurately to isolate it from the background, making sure the shadow is not selected - just the object. When there is a good amount of contrast I find I can sometimes do this with the Quick Selection tool, but most of the time I find any of the obvious auto selection methods, like Quick Selection, Focus Area and Select Subject don't do a great job, leaving bits out or selecting parts of the shadow, and I have to tidy it up manually with the Lasso tool or a Path selection. Often it's a light object like white book pages on a pale gray background, so there isn't a huge amount of contrast between the two

Any tips for speeding these things up without reducing quality?

Thank you!

Thom

This topic has been closed for replies.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

In the sample image the Object Selection Tool seems to work pretty well.

What are the output needs?

Do you need to provide files with transparent background or do you insert new backgrounds?

thomatkinsonAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks everyone!

Lumigraphics - I'm the photographer and I'm a pro of about 20 years. I'm pretty sure I've done all I can on the shooting side to make the retouch easy. As I see it, the selections issue is to do with contrast between backgrounds and objects, which is needed to make good selections, but not always possible e.g. if the client wants a light object shooting on a light background. Every shot is cleaned up on set with compressed air or sometimes a microfibre cloth, but inevitably dust gets through and there are other marks on paper and cardf which cannot be removed on set, so I think I'm probably I'm looking for retouching solutions.

Myra - thank you, that's very helpful. I found the Object selection worked well on this image, but I should have posted the orginal image beofre the background colour was altered - sorry about that. I'm attaching below. As you can see the light colour of the record sleeve and the light background are very close to one another and difficult to select. This si quite an extreme exmaple, which I guess is why I chose it. Any ideas for improving my selection skills here? I'm also attaching another image which shows an Object Selection on an image with a darker object. The trouble is, the edges of an object are often not perfectly solid, so the selection skips part of it out, and I have to go in manually to fix it. All of this would be fixed by using a darker or coloured background, but unfortunaly I can't do that for reasons relating to the brief and photography. Thanks also for your thoughts on the Camera RAW dusting. There is a similar option in Capture One but I've never really used Camera RAW - I will give it a go. I'm attaching an example of the dust/marks I'm talking about, which seems a bit more tricky. This is a close up and I need to remove these sorts of marks all over the dark areas of the image. Some of it is in the print and can't be remoeved and some is probably dust missed by the compressed air. I wonder if there are even less laborious ways to deal with dust/marks like this - any ideas?

c.pfaffenbichler - see above re the Object Selection tool. I should have posted the orginal grey background image, which I'm finding a bit tricker - sorry about that. Do you have any thoughts about the best way with the attached image? Output is mainly for web - JPG 2500px wide, but also for small scale print, so high res TIFFs are supplied to the client. The backgrounnds don't usually need to be transparent. The background is selected for a few reasons but most commonly to desaturate the background to a perfectly neutral grey or add a solid color layer set to blending mode Multiply in order to change the background to match specific colour references, and to isolate the object so I can manipulate colour and contrast separately - bring in the blacks, take off a bit of sheen from the lightiing sometimes etc. The backgrounds must usually be identical across a whole set of images.

Thanks again!

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

With that file the Object Selection Tool still seems to do »fairly well« but a need for manual amendations seems close to inevitable.

If you should work with very high volumes of images I wonder if you might consider using clipping services?

Myra Ferguson

Community Expert

I'd recommend using the Object Selection tool set to Rectangle mode in the Options bar (Window > Options). Draw a rectangle around one object, hold Shift while drawing a rectangle around the other object, and click the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to convert the selection in to a Layer Mask.

To remove the spots, try using the Camera Raw filter (Filter > Camera Raw...)--you might apply the filter to your content after converting it to Smart Object first so that the edits are applied as a Smart Filter. When Camera Raw opens, click on the Healing tools on the right (the 2nd icon from the top). You can select any of the Healing tools, Content Aware Remove, Heal, or Clone. Heal might be the best for removing spots. At the bottom of the Healing section, select Visualize Spots to help you find the spots in the image. Then use whichever tool you selected to remove the spots. Click OK to apply the edits.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

Where are you getting your originals from? Proper photography will eliminate both of your issues.

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