Garibaldi's up close and personal

I took a lot of Garibaldi images on "Truth Trip II". This guy came right up to me and suggested I leave. I took a few images first.

After looking at the first image (the original with almost no corrections of any kind), I decided that a completely black background would make the fish stand out even morel. To do this I opened the image in Photoshop and used the Extract function to isolate the fish. Then I created a background layer and made it totally black. Flatten the image and voila!

I like the second image better than the first, althought the first is still a very good image.

Enjoy,

M

Paul,

Beautiful shot! I love it when they get in your face like that. The senoritas also seem to see their reflection in the dome port and "Attack!"

What would happen if you set the black point (in curves) to be the background? I think replacing the background to be a little tedious, and you really have to feather the edge of the subject, or it sometimes looks "fake."

Cheers

James

It looks fake. For one thing, look at the left eye. Perfectly sharp in top photo, appears to have something growing on it in bottom image. Also, look in the lower right-hand corner; you missed a few spots, and the background is part brown, part black. A number of places along the edges look fishy, with some extra brown.

People are becoming more sensitive to this -- with a perfect, black background I often think "Photoshop," and some of the impact is lost.

There are professional cropping and compositing tools that should be able to do crop much better than Photoshop. Don't know anything about them, though.

I tend to like the original better just because I'm biased to original images with minimal PS work. It is amazing what you can do in PS but that's not the point of our hobby (profession for some). After all we can all come up with some great u/w images by using PS and not even get wet. I have the greatest respect for the images that have the least done to them but are still spectacular. BTW Photoshop IS the professional tool of choice in every graphics shop I've ever been in, and I used to work for one of the companies that made workstation retouching consoles.

It looks fake. For one thing, look at the left eye. Perfectly sharp in top photo, appears to have something growing on it in bottom image. Also, look in the lower right-hand corner; you missed a few spots, and the background is part brown, part black. A number of places along the edges look fishy, with some extra brown.

 

People are becoming more sensitive to this -- with a perfect, black background I often think "Photoshop," and some of the impact is lost.

 

There are professional cropping and compositing tools that should be able to do crop much better than Photoshop. Don't know anything about them, though.

Well if I had taken more than a couple of minutes to do this it would be undetectable. I was looking more for the effect than accuracy. Photoshop is the choice of most graphics houses to make these sorts of changes. If I was publishing/printing this I would have taken the time.

Still, as I said - the original is a good shot as is :-)

M

Well if I had taken more than a couple of minutes to do this it would be undetectable. I was looking more for the effect than accuracy. Photoshop is the choice of most graphics houses to make these sorts of changes. If I was publishing/printing this I would have taken the time.

 

Still, as I said - the original is a good shot as is :-)

I stand corrected.

I prefer the first photo, but think the second -- with some tweaking -- would do well for something like a web page image, where a black background is necessary and people expect some image editing.

Shoot the Garabaldi at F16 using the 60mm lens. This will give you a black background without PS.