Got a light?

[billtils]

[mugge]

The background dominate in my view with the scribble on the wall. Maybe blurring the background will alleviate that problem.
Cheers Ole

[billtils]

Agree Ole, but I'm still at an early point in the learning curve after switching to LrC. This one addresses those issues but needs more work yet - I want to leave some visibility of the graffiti

[DanK]

Nice capture.

I agree with Ole, but I don't think a vignette is where I would start. I'm curious how much what I would do overlaps with what you did.

LRC offers very strong editing tools now. As a starting point, I told LRC to select the subject, which it did well. I then inverted the mask to get the background, darkened it by .25. and reduced saturation by 11. Then I created a brush mask and burned the brighter stones just in front of and behind the subject. that got me this far with just a few mouse clicks:



IMHO, a good next step would be one of the things you did, which is to blur the stones somewhat. I'd do it only a bit. A vignette as a final touch might be good, but personally, I would do it less aggressively. Just my taste.

BTW, the halo at the top of his hair wasn't a result of my edits. It's in the copy I downloaded. If you used subject selection, it may be that it didn't select quite right. Or this could be a sharpening artifact.

[billtils]

Dan, my first 4 steps were the same as you used but if (one of) the editing objectives is to reduce the impact of the graffiti, they really don't do much. I brushed in some burning in PS on the stones too, and also his coat. I then tried to selectively reduce the saturation and luminosity of the red in the graffiti using an HSL layer in PS but couldn't get it right**, and the physical distance between subject and wall makes it a bit hard to get reduction of the impact of the wall + graffiti using blur, and I probably pushed that option a bit too far. I'm sure there's an interesting photo in there somewhere and I'll keep working on it.

This one looks like it will be good for my Lightroom journey ... Oh, and I did try editing out the graffiti but that reduced the interest in the shot too much;

(And thanks for pointing out the halo, I missed that. It was probably because it was shot in quite a strong mid-day shadow and there is a little bit of sharpening in my default Topaz denoise settings).

** One of the several things that attracted me in the first place was trying to make something of the red graffiti and red tie.

[Manfred M]

Hi Bill - this is a tough one because of all of the tagging on the wall. The wall is busy enough, but add the high contrast "artwork" and your main subject just can't compete.

I've spent a bit of time removing the tagged areas and have rebuilt parts of the image. This is way beyond what can be done in Lightroom and its limited selection tools.

The halos Dan refers to are likely a result of oversharpening.


Here is my "quick & dirty" version that still needs a bit more work.

[billtils]

Thanks Manfred - see my reply to Dan which I think covers most of the points that you raise. If the object is solely to get rid of the graffiti possibly the best answer would be to select the subject and paste into a different (but suitable) background, but I like the graffiti - just not that much

I was very aware of it when I took the shot and it was more or less the composition I was after. The only set up factor I would have changed would have been to have him smoking or even better actually getting a light (but that would have been a step too far given what I feel about that habit).

[DanK]

Interesting. I saw the tagging as too prominent but at the same time a key part of the environment. Would it make sense to keep it but make it less prominent?

I added few edits. I again selected the background, used point color to select the color of the tagging, and decreased saturation, increased luminance (it stood out partly because it was darker), and shifted the hue to be more like the wall. This required that I again darken the background, a bit overall and particularly in front of and behind his head. Is this a direction worth pursuing? If so, I would think about ways of further reducing the tagging right up against the face.

[billtils]

Thanks Dan - exactly that!

[Manfred M]

Thanks Dan - exactly that!

Design is an iterative process. I find that I often push changes too hard and have to go back a bit. Based on Dan's latest edit, this is probably where you want to end up, but for my personal taste, the wall and graffiti still overwhelm the main subject.

If it were my image, I would back off my edit a bit, but still have a less distinct wall and graffiti. But that's my taste and style and not yours...

[DanK]

I had one more thought. Why not use the AI-based generative remove in LRC or Photoshop to remove the tagging closest to the face, after toning down the rest of it as already done? This has only been introduced in LRC with the most recent update, but in my limited experience, it works very well. For a clear explanation, check out https://phlearn.com/tutorial/generat...troom-classic/