Rejections: Overfiltering
One of the most common rejection reasons on iStockphoto is the “overfiltering” rejection, largely because it encompasses so many possible causes. In this new “Rejections” series, I’ll look at some of the more common causes of the various iStockphoto rejections, and what you can do to avoid the most likely pitfalls.
When it comes to “overfiltering”, one of the things I hate to see is poor editing or cloning. This often happens when the contributor is trying to remove some other rejectable element in an image – a visible person for whom there’s no model release, a logo or other copyright-protected element, or sensor spots, perhaps – but does it in a less than seamless way. Any editing of this sort has to appear natural and realistic, and not look like the file has been edited.
Let’s use this image of a tent in the backyard to illustrate the wrong ways to go about removing material, then we can look at a good solution. As you can see, the bottom corner of the tent door has a manufacturer’s logo and a hand-painted “W1″. The logo is a no-go for iStock, so it will have to be removed. The “w1″ is not really problematic in terms of iStockphoto’s standards, but it’s also not doing me any favors in the image. It’s a distraction, and this would be a more usable image without it, so out it goes.
When it comes to doing it wrong, the three main culprits are The Blur, The Splotch, and The Clone:
The Blur
This is the easiest and least effective way to edit out undesirable elements. The contributor often selects the element (using a mask or lasso selection) and just adds the Gaussian Blur filter. There’s almost no way to make this an effective edit; selectively blurred areas stick out like sore thumbs. Not only does it leave an ugly and distracting region in the image, it also looks completely unnatural. Even more delicate selections than I did here are usually unconvincing. They will, by definition, be more blurry than their surroundings, and more blurry than the lens would have made it. There are really very few applications of this that would look natural.
The Splotch
This is what I call those cases where the contributor opted to cover over the undesirable mark. In general, that’s a fine idea, but The Splotch is a bad way to do it. This is when it’s covered over with just a painted-on single color brush stroke. In the tent example, the areas surrounding the marks we want to remove are mostly monochromatic – the maroon surrounding the “W1″ and the off-white surrounding the manufacturer’s logo. So you might think that a single color stroke could work. But click on that thumbnail above to see how ineffective that is. The big problem with The Splotch is that it makes no effort to replicate the texture of the surface.
The Clone
The Splotch fails because it doesn’t take into account the texture of actual material, so why not use the actual material to cover up the marks? Great idea, and usually when I need to fix an area, that’s my first step as well. But it must be done right. As a click on the thumbnail to the left will attest, it’s very easy to do it wrong. This is more common than you might think. I probably end up rejecting up to five or so images a day for overfiltering of this nature. It comes from a lazy application of cloning techniques. The clone stamp source is set once, and the contributor just click-click-clicks until the offending elements are covered up.
So if that’s how to do it wrong, how do we go about getting it right? The short answer is that there’s no short answer. It really depends on the specifics of the image. For this tent image (the iStock version, by the way, lives here), I did a combination of cloning and healing brush.
Step 1 was some cloning onto a new layer (everything is done on new layers, of course). The key here is to try to match the lights and darks of the fabric wrinkles. There is not going to be a single clone source that will do it all, so I make sure to continually set new clone sources, taking some highlights from one area, some shadows from another. Don’t be afraid, also, to cover over areas that are actually just fine in the original. Sometimes it takes doing that to make the edits appear to blend in seamlessly. Be on the lookout for obvious pattern repetitions. The crop below shows the results of the cloning step. It’s not bad, but I’ve highlighted areas that are too obvious.
So we move on to step 2. On another new layer, I start using the Healing Brush tool (J). The key to using this tool is to keep a small brush and use multiple small strokes. The tool is most effective when you’re using it away from any hard edges or abrupt color changes. With those guidelines in mind, I did some selective healing to the trouble spots above, and got this:
And there you have it. A much smoother and more seamless edit. The same techniques apply whether I’m removing logos, skin blemishes, wandering background strangers, or annoying sensor spots.