Editing metal textures

[Equilibrium8]

I always find it difficult to edit metal surfaces like chrome and steel in Photoshop. When patching and cloning, metal surfaces appear to be even more finicky than skin as they start looking fake with even a minimal amount of editing.

Does anybody have tips for working with metal surfaces? My Google searches only come up with irrelevant results.

[Shadowman]

Try reflective surfaces or still life.

[carolus]

Does anybody have tips for working with metal surfaces? My Google searches only come up with irrelevant results.

As a watch collector, I have found that metal surfaces are best handled by getting the lighting correct for the subject. It's not easy. Watch movements can be really painful; bright shiny coins even worse.

Specular highlights can be reduced pre-shot with diffusers. However, that tends to reduce contrast - so that nice brushed finish turns dull-looking. This can often be countered by changing the angle of lighting on the surface of interest. Sometimes a small, bright light can be used to bring emphasis to a zone, sometimes not. If diffusers are used, the bigger the better because a diffuser is less of a point source. Having the lamps separate from the diffusers can help in this regard. Bringing a lamp closer to a diffuser tends the lighting back toward a point source.

For the watch work, I always use a tripod, manual focus and never use flash.

Main point being that work done on lighting before pushing the shutter button can make life a lot easier in post (a truism, I know) but, in my experience, an incorrectly-lit watch shot is usually unrecoverable in post.

Chas.

[Mike Buckley]

Chas really nailed it. (Welcome to CiC, Chas!) The only thing I can clarify is that using a diffuser doesn't really reduce contrast, at least not how I think of contrast. It spreads the light waves in all sorts of directions and that results in softer shadows. When trying to reveal the small details of a brushed metal surface, the harder, well-defined shadows will reveal the texture better.

I first learned about this stuff two years ago reading the fourth edition of Light: Science & Magic and can't recommend it highly enough. One of its many explanations pertains to the dramatic changes that can be accomplished when leaving a shiny metal subject and the camera in the same position while changing only the position of a single light source. To experience it for myself, I replicated the exercise explained in the book and produced photos displayed in this thread.

[Manfred M]

The main issue with shiney metals (and this is common to other refective surfaces like glass and still water) is that the nature of the reflection is that in cloning (and patching) you have to get two things right in the sample that you are planning to use for the repair. Both the reflection shown on the metal and the material texture (or curvature) itself need to be darn close to being identical for the retouching process to work.

I've had the most success by "borrowing" material from a different shot of the same subject. I usually work from a near similar image and use that in the repair. I've had very limited success using material in the actual image itself as a source for the clone. The only exception here is that moving a catchlight in one eye to another is usually fairly trivial.

As Charles and Mike have already pointed out; getting it right in capture is really the easiest way to go.

[JR1]

http://learnmyshot.com/how-to-photog...-chrome-metal/

google

Photographing shiny objects

[Mike Buckley]

The piece Jeremy provided states "Now that you found where the light is being reflected from (in our case- above and behind the subject) you need to light that area." Another way of saying that is now that you have determined the family of angles, you need to place a light source so it fills the family of angles. That's if you want the metal to be bright. If you want the metal to be dark (which is probably a very rare situation), you would place the light source so it is outside the family of angles.

The piece is very misleading in my mind when it states that "Since the object is very reflective, it makes no sense to light the object itself." If the object is reflecting the light source as explained in the piece, the object is being lit.

The video that was supposed to be available actually wasn't available at the time I tried reviewing it. Perhaps the video clarifies that statement so it is not misleading.