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Folk Festival Photos

Robert Watcher

Well-known member
Saturday evening, Anne and I spent time with our friends at the Home County Folk Festival in London, Ontario. I sat in my seat a distance from the stage, and shot with long focal lengths of 150mm to 600mm.

This distance actually provides a nice view of the performers - without looking up at them if standing right in front of the stage. The main issues are keeping audience and extraneous pieces of gear from obstructing the performers.

I did a decent job of that, but on a few I decided to try the "Inpainting Brush Tool" (basically Content Aware tool) in Affinity Photo. While not always perfect, still I was amazed that I could draw these things and they would disappear. I could never clone, and get anything close to the results as when I kept going over the areas to get an acceptable look.

These first two images show 1) a perfect scenario where simple non-obtrusive elements can easily be taken out while keeping textures and the naturalness of the surroundings and 2) a complete elimination of elements that cover part of the subject - - - all with straight out of the camera frames and ones drawn over with the Inpainting Brush Tool:



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Robert Watcher

Well-known member
For these two, I wanted to try some extensive removal stuff - and after the sign disappeared fairly effortlessly - - - just for the fun of it, I gave a stab at eliminating the whole set of drums. I literally couldn't believe my eyes. I did do a little cloning on that last one, to provide some extra lights to fill in the gaps.



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Jarmo Juntunen

Well-known member
Good job! Personally, I don't mind seeing the gear in the originals, as in a way that was a part of the concert, too. But I can see why you did what you did. Looks like a good concert, by the way.
 

Antonio Correia

Well-known member
That was an easy task to do.
When the background or adjacent areas are complex the results are not that great. I mean even poor, bad.
Yes, I do understand that it is not the Holly Grail. At least for now... time will come that the result will be astonishing, in 5 years time perhaps.
But the results obtained are generally excellent and pretty fast.

I do not like that I open a file and when I want to save it in TIFF (why the double FF ?) or better - when exporting the file - Affinity doesn't remember when it came from and makes me to look for the starting folder.

i-BXP52s3-X2.jpg


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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief

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Robert,

I'm just amazed by the color and texture of the faces. Generally the colors are awful at concerts. Did you use auto WB or flash?

The removal of objects over black is not the hard thing for me, it's getting past the odd colors of the stage often in the worse and dimmest light!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
That was an easy task to do.
When the background or adjacent areas are complex the results are not that great. I mean even poor, bad.
Yes, I do understand that it is not the Holly Grail. At least for now... time will come that the result will be astonishing, in 5 years time perhaps.
But the results obtained are generally excellent and pretty fast.

I do not like that I open a file and when I want to save it in TIFF (why the double FF ?) or better - when exporting the file - Affinity doesn't remember when it came from and makes me to look for the starting folder.

i-BXP52s3-X2.jpg



Antonio,

'This content aware challenge would be hard for Photoshop CC 2015! There is no way yet that the program can recognize and reconstruct figures in behind a deleted person! If you wish, however, you could easily remove the people on the right in front of that wall and likely as not, the wall woulds be reconstructed pretty well. That's where content aware seems to work best - completing patterns or extending textures.

Asher
 

Robert Watcher

Well-known member

20150718-P7183246-Edit.jpg




Robert,

I'm just amazed by the color and texture of the faces. Generally the colors are awful at concerts. Did you use auto WB or flash?

The removal of objects over black is not the hard thing for me, it's getting past the odd colors of the stage often in the worse and dimmest light!

Asher

The colours in these shots were a result of the concert being outdoors and the musicians on the stage, being backlit with colours - but they didn't overpower the main light.

I use Auto White Balance. There is no way I could have (or would have) used flash. I was shooting from a long distance away using 300 to 600 mm focal lengths for the closer shots and 150 to 200 mm focal lengths for the full lengths.

I agree that the black background with simpler elements is an easier task for removing objects. This 'content aware' technology is far from perfect and in reality, never will be able to think or presume or know what texture and content lie behind something. Why would we even think that it could right?

It is simply a very useful aid in some situations - in the cases I have shown, far superior to cloning - and at the least, a good starting point for continued retouching with other tools. I was simply astonished at how it could assemble anything usable when dragging my brush over large areas like the drums or sign.

BTW - Antonio - - - one thing that I learned when using this tool, is to keep going over the area in different directions and sometimes different brush sizes until it looks decent. Doing that with healing or cloning tools, would be a disaster, but the "Inpainting Brush Tool" doesn't seem to destroy in the same way. I downloaded your image of the girl on grass and with a few brush strokes had an acceptable fix with removing the pail with our residue showing
 

Robert Watcher

Well-known member
A few more from the evening. Ben Caplan is one of the strangest and most entertaining acts. During a couple of songs, intense red backlights fired through his hair, causing the blown out reds to have this bizarre effect.

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WAITING FOR THE MOMENT

Being that I was locked to my chair to the front of the stage, I was forced to anticipate the movements of the entertainer to get a variety of angles. To get this type of profile image, I would have to be at the side of the stage and then at a height so that I wouldn't be shooting up (a reason that tI like shooting from a distance).

And so I just watched his patterns and got to know when he would turn away or react a certain way. And so I was able to end up with this nice full profile. You can tell what is going on by looking at the direction of the mic and mic stand which are aiming more to me. But the illusion works.

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Some of Ben's crazy antics portrayed here.


bencaplan.jpg



A USEFUL TIP BTW

I noticed on the camera and phone screens of people around me shooting pictures, all showed completely blown out performers. When I visited the events Facebook page - same thing from viewer photos.

For the complete event - when aiming at the stage - my exposure compensation was dialed in to minus 2 to minus 3 stops to compensate for the dark background and brightness of the entertainer. Old school training always comes in handy.


---------
 

Robert Watcher

Well-known member
As the intense darkness settled in on this outdoor event, lighting was dictated by the few floodlights that were overhead the acts. This isn't a polished lighting setup - an overhead cage with a string of lights on the back for some coloured light coming through the hair - as well as a few white lights in the front.

Shooting with longer lenses limited me to f5.6 when in the 600mm range and f4 when in the 140-200mm range - - - thus in the darker evening, my ISO hit 5,000 ISO for these shots at slower shutters speeds sometimes as slow as 1/40'th second.

I made use of Image Stabilization for the camera movement, and trying to shoot at peak action for subject movement. That can be seen in many of the images where the subject is reasonably sharp, while their hands are moving.

These shots of two well known groups - "The Grapes of Wrath" - and "The Leahy's" were taken once darkness fell upon the event. The light quality wasn't as nice as earlier when the natural daylight was prominent.



EPL58803.jpg



EPL58804.jpg



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leahy.jpg


 

Robert Watcher

Well-known member

This performer is Irish Mythen.

You may have noticed in this photo: during one of the songs, her string broke - she pulled the peg out, unwound the string, retuned a couple of strings and carried on - barely missing a beat, while the fiddle player carried on.

When the song was complete, a new string was brought out and she had to hunt around the floor for the peg. A couple of minutes, and she was all set to carry on.

It is unusual to break bottom (lowest sounding) strings. Made for an interesting moment.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
As the intense darkness settled in on this outdoor event, lighting was dictated by the few floodlights that were overhead the acts. This isn't a polished lighting setup - an overhead cage with a string of lights on the back for some coloured light coming through the hair - as well as a few white lights in the front.

Shooting with longer lenses limited me to f5.6 when in the 600mm range and f4 when in the 140-200mm range - - - thus in the darker evening, my ISO hit 5,000 ISO for these shots at slower shutters speeds sometimes as slow as 1/40'th second.

I made use of Image Stabilization for the camera movement, and trying to shoot at peak action for subject movement. That can be seen in many of the images where the subject is reasonably sharp, while their hands are moving.

These shots of two well known groups - "The Grapes of Wrath" - and "The Leahy's" were taken once darkness fell upon the event. The light quality wasn't as nice as earlier when the natural daylight was prominent.



EPL58803.jpg



EPL58804.jpg



EPL58820.jpg



leahy.jpg



Robert,

That 3rd picture, with one player so deep on the dark stage is a huge challenge. This is where a camera like the A7s is a blessing. Still, you have succeeded amazingly! Is this the Olympus 4/3? Technology has really advanced so much in just the last 5 years!

Impressive! Did you have to do a lot of noise removal and what's you favorite app for that?

Asher
 
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