Pixiq

The trouble with working away from your own studio, is that – however carefully you plan – you never have all you need readily at hand.

 I had been waiting a week for the rare and unusual Elephant yam flower to open under glass at Kew Gardens and when it did, it was larger than I had imagined. So large, in fact, it virtually completely covered the two large A1 artist's boards I had stashed in the car together with lighting stands, tripod, reflectors and diffuser.  After taking some side views and close-ups of the floral parts, I wanted to shoot it from above for a cut out. This simple uncluttered background is not only good for the web, but also popular for print with certain clients because they can scatter them anywhere on a page and by wriggling text around them, cram much more onto a page.

Without a high rise tripod and a stepladder for me to stand on, I had to take this shot with a wide-angle lens.  Even though the result looks a mess with a hose snaking across the floor, tripod legs plus my own, I knew I could quickly fix it in Photoshop as the flower had a simple wavy edge without any hairs or spines.

The first thing I did was to crop in tightly on the flower.  I did this several times rotating the crop at one corner each time, making sure never to crop into the flower. Finally, I was left with just the flower and very little surround.

The corners of the cropped image, where the frame was rotated outside the image area, appeared a true white, so by clicking on the paint bucket, I sampled this area with the pipette and in filled with the paint bucket – doing each part in turn. The few bits left were removed using the Clone Stamp tool. Total time to date 5 minutes.

Then, I used the Crop tool to rotate the flower slightly to the left and finally, using Image > Canvas size I increased the canvas size all round to get the image I originally envisaged as a neat cut out.

The total time, from opening the RAW file to saving the finished TIFF was 7 minutes. In other words, it was a piece of cake!  Mind you, this method works only when the edge of the subject is a fairly even darkish tone, without any hairs or spines.

I am aware there are many blogs and videos explaining how to cut out in Photoshop using the lasso tool, the pen tool or extract tool. However, I would much rather be out in the field shooting new shots and observing the interaction between animals and plants rather than spending time working at a computer, so speed is the essence for me.