picture rescued?

[Dave Pickett]

I've always liked the exression on this picture revealing some charactor, but the flaws are pretty obvious:

so a bit of cropping, fair bit of cloning then rough select and a bit of gausian blur gives me this:

Taken on a dull day, Fuji 9500 on 400 ISO before I got my Nikons. Actually prints very well at about 250 DPI on A4.

C&C welcome of course (have noticed a bitmore blur needed around the arm!!!)

 

[andiphoto]

second image is alot better.. gets rid of alot of the disctractions in the background...

 

[natjag]

nice work, well done.

 

[Yv]

the idea is great and improves the picture no end, but the cloning is a bit too obvious imo. Can I ask di you crop or clone first? It 'looks' like crop, though I apologise if I am wrong, but I think its needs more selection available for the clone area so use the existing background to clone before cropping. If you did clone first, have another go and make it a bot more...'random' if that make sense. Otherwise, yes, you have definately rescued it and I like the result.

 

[CT]

The crop version works better, but I have to agree that the repetitive cloning patterns are far too obvious.

 

[Yv]

damn you CT, I did that too, then noticed his edit box wasn't ticked, but for what its worth, yes that much more how the cloning should look