Help with photo fix (CS3)

GraphyFotoz

I got this shot of a Female Swallowtail tonite.

I'm not familiar with the fancy stuff you can do with Photoshop.
How do I go about fixing the damaged wing?
Lasso then......well I'm lost.....:rolleyes

jfriend

GraphyFotoz wrote:

I got this shot of a Female Swallowtail tonite.

I'm not familiar with the fancy stuff you can do with Photoshop.
How do I go about fixing the damaged wing?
Lasso then......well I'm lost.....

Here's what I did:

• Use the polygon lasso to outline a section of the right wing that's a mirror of the damaged area (just make sure to include enough, you don't have to be accurate at all).
• Copy to the clipboard
• Paste into a new layer
• With that layer selected in the layers palette, do Edit/Transform/Flip Horizontal to make a mirrow image so you can use it on the other side.
• Now, temporarily set the opacity to 50% so you can see both the new layer and the layer below.
• With the pointer tool, drag the new layer over to the damaged side.
• Select Edit/Free Transform
• Move the pointer to where you see the rotation arrows (just outside a corner of the selection and rotate the layer until it lines up with the one below in rotation. Hit Return to accept that rotation.
• With the pointer tool, move it into the right position now that it's properly rotated. Fix the rotation again if you need to.
• Now, it should be lined up in place, you just need to blend it in with a mask.
• Create a mask on that new layer.
• Set your brush to black with a soft edge and a fairly large size.
• Paint on the mask with black to block the areas of the new layer in the places where you don't want to see it. You may want to turn the opacity back to 100% so you can see the final result while doing this.
• The rest of painting this mask is just just technique to blend the two layers so only the part of the new layer you need is showing through and the blended area is in a black area that's easy to blend. I don't know how to describe it in any more detail.

My attempt looks like this:

GraphyFotoz

WOW amazing!!

Super job......with your instructions and my lack of full knowledge of CS3....I'm hopelessly lost!
What can I say other than I'm CS3 challenged!

I dropped ya a email on the matter.

pathfinder

Nicely done, John.

I find the wear and tear on butterflies interesting, and indicative of the tough, brief life they live.

jfriend

GraphyFotoz wrote:

WOW amazing!!

Super job......with your instructions and my lack of full knowledge of CS3....I'm hopelessly lost!
What can I say other than I'm CS3 challenged!

I dropped ya a email on the matter.

Did you try to follow the steps? Is there a specific step you got lost on? Until you get to the last step, it's mostly just a matter of finding the right features in Photoshop to implement the directions because they are pretty straightforward and don't take any particularly tricky skills. If you're stuck somewhere, why not ask for some help so you can learn how to do this yourself?