I was looking through my collection of older images tonight – a valuable exercise – and came across and image that I shot in May 2007 using my first digital SLR camera – a Canon 30D. I really liked the composition (after all, I took the shot!) but there was a big post right in the middle of the image that basically destroyed the shot. In the latest versions of Photoshop, Adobe has added several “content-aware” tools that help edit out these kinds of problems. Using this image, I set to work to remove the post – and just generally clean up the image.
Once I had removed the post and a few phone poles on the distant shore, I wanted to simplify the grasses in the foreground and the water in Tomales Bay – while preserving the lovely detail on the fishing boat. Using a combination of the Topaz Simplify 3 plugin and Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2, I was able to get to an image that I enjoyed a lot more. I hope you do too (click on the image to see the larger size)!