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Large looping oil stains on sensor removal


Archbob

Active Member
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I had a large looping stain on my sensor last time I shot(since has been cleaned) and I can't seem to remove them. I tried both photoshop and lightroom(I have the latest version of CC now since I'm on the subscription). I tried clone stamp, heal and patch but the photo just doesn't look good once I remove the stain. Should I try cloning with smaller circles?

Here's the image(enhanced in Lightroom, but not stain removed):
http://www.goodfreephotos.com/final1.jpg

Original image:
http://goodfreephotos.com/IMG_1541.dng
 

Tom Mann

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Here's what (literally) a minute of work in PS CC 2014 can do.

1. I quickly selected the stain using the free-form lasso tool;

2. Applied the content-aware fill tool (with color adaptation) to the above selection;

3. Enlarged the selection a bit so as not to have exactly identical borders, then used the patch tool;

4. Saw that the horizontal part of the sensor stain wasn't removed as much as I would like, so hit just that part again with the patch tool.

5. Done

If you need a better final result than I got, just spend some more time on it ... maybe also throwing in some work with the clone (aka, "stamp" ) tool, and certainly using different selections each time you use one of these tools so the edges of the selections don't all coincide, as well as to pick up any lightly stained areas that you may have missed earlier. Also, if the slight reduction in noise in the area you worked on is annoying, just add some noise back into those areas. I didn't bother with that step.

HTH,

Tom M
 

Attachments

  • DSLR_senor_stain-tjm01-ps02a_cropped_resized_to_698px-8bpc-for_GIF.gif
    DSLR_senor_stain-tjm01-ps02a_cropped_resized_to_698px-8bpc-for_GIF.gif
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Archbob

Active Member
Messages
34
Likes
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Here's what (literally) a minute of work in PS CC 2014 can do.

1. I quickly selected the stain using the free-form lasso tool;

2. Applied the content-aware fill tool (with color adaptation) to the above selection;

3. Enlarged the selection a bit so as not to have exactly identical borders, then used the patch tool;

4. Saw that the horizontal part of the sensor stain wasn't removed as much as I would like, so hit just that part again with the patch tool.

5. Done

If you need a better final result than I got, just spend some more time on it ... maybe also throwing in some work with the clone (aka, "stamp" ) tool, and certainly using different selections each time you use one of these tools so the edges of the selections don't all coincide, as well as to pick up any lightly stained areas that you may have missed earlier. Also, if the slight reduction in noise in the area you worked on is annoying, just add some noise back into those areas. I didn't bother with that step.

HTH,

Tom M

Thanks, definately going to try this, all my photos that day have this stain on them.
 

Archbob

Active Member
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I can't seem to find the content-aware fill tool, is that the paint bucket tool?
Edit: NvM, figured it out.
 
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Tom Mann

Guru
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Thanks, definitely going to try this, all my photos that day have this stain on them.
One more point ... problems in the sky are easy to fix because there is little obvious structure in the sky. If it's a blue or gray sky, there is no structure at all, and if it's full of nice fluffy clouds, while structured, their edges and the layout of the light and dark areas are quasi-random, so it doesn't matter if your fix is a little off. For this reason the tools I used on this photo (ie, content aware fill and patch) are the most appropriate as they provide nice quick and dirty improvements, but not as much control as other methods.

OTOH, if you have a problem in an area where there is a lot of hard edged, straight line or other man-made type of detail, then the problem gets a lot more difficult and one has to use different methods /tools in such cases. IMHO, that's where the clone (aka, stamp) tool really comes into its own, but, with it, you have to work slowly and methodically to produce the missing detail that needs to fill in the corrupted areas.

More later,

Tom M
 

peta62

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Tom Mann - yes and it does not have to be anything wrong with your camera. Once I have spent around ten hours on one picture, I promised a friend to take a nice picture of his church situated on a junction, he wanted to remove all the trolleybus wires and poles :banghead:
 

Tom Mann

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I feel your pain, Peter.

My version of your story is that about a year ago, one of my customers asked me to shoot a historic firehouse about 20 miles from home for some PR publications, an appeal for $$$, some associated festivities, etc.

When I got there, I discovered that there was absolutely no way to get a shot of the building without including all the power and telephone lines that criss-crossed just a few feet in front of it. You should have seen the fun I had removing those lines where they were in front of the brick and woodwork, the number, "25" on the building, etc.. The only lines I didn't have to deal with were those for the flag.

Although it may look like I shot this at dawn on a Sunday morning, it was actually a weekday, right around the evening rush hour, so even more impressive was that I was able to get the shot without being killed by the constant stream of traffic including some coming from directly behind me. Fortunately, the FD had no hesitation temporarily blocking the streets for me. Of course, that put no time pressure on me, LOL

T

PS - I think I pulled the wrong image for the "after" shot -- it looks a bit oversharpened, but I'm too lazy to find the right one and change it.
 

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  • 01-D7C_0744-01.jpg
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peta62

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Hi Tom, I went to my old disk to find out the church picture, to show what did it mean getting rid of all cables. All additional manipulations were wish of my friend, I did not agree with some of them, but I promised.

_m3l5310_ps_orig_s.jpg
_m3l5310_ps_b.ns_s.jpg
 

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