Mission Accomplished

Hi everyone:

Happy spring! Sorry it's been a while - I haven't been myself lately and have had some trouble making time for art-related activities. Hopefully I'm back on the horse for good now. Blogging tunes today are a bit of a mish-mosh: a new playlist with some White Lies, some very old New Order, a little Social Distortion...a nice mix to keep the blood moving.

So, in my last post, I showed y'all this new image I had, and complained that the retouching on it was going to be a complete pain in the ass. Well, I finally got around to working on this image again, and I'm pretty please with the results. Below is a before, and an after:

Before:

After:

When attacking this little project, I kept trying to convince myself that simply cropping out that baby swing was fine. Well, it wasn't. The image just wasn't as strong - all of the other elements were exactly where I wanted them - which makes sense, since I do most of my composing "in camera," rather than in post. So, bottom line: a baby out there is gonna be missing his swing.

So, what was involved here? Well, I first attacked the ropes that the swing was hanging from. I knew those would be the easiest - the sky and trees were an irregular pattern with textures and tones that would be relatively easy to clone and blend. It took a little while, but that particular piece was relatively painless. Then came the tough part - the swing itself. I not only needed to get rid of the swing, but also had to build out what was behind it - part of the house, roof and chimney. I hit the chimney first - and even added a little sun glare to give it some depth and not make it look like one continuous blob. The house was a little tricky - getting the lines and the tones to match up properly took a little time, but all in all, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. This was a good exercise for me - it had been a while since I'd taken on such a major retouching project, and it's nice to know that I haven't completely lost my touch.

The next trick will be to see if I keep the image "as is," or run it through my printing process. I'll probably run it through the process first - just to see what the colors do when they hit the paper. I hope to get to that this week, so I'll let everyone know the results!

Also, that roll of film should finally be processed by now (lab was running behind), so hopefully I'll have a lot more news soon. So, stay tuned - and be well!

-Marc