Remove metal grill

wornish

Senior Member
I went round a working museum today and got some great shots.

I am totally frustrated though in trying to get good shots of some the old machines because they are surrounded by metal safety fences. Health and Safety !

Anyone got any suggestions on how to remove them in post , is it even possible?

Here is one machine taken with flash and again without flash.

flash.jpg


No flash.jpg
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
I have removed chain link fencing before - using the Healing Brush tool in PS - but it was a time consuming PITA and nowhere near as complicated a fix as those photos.

If someone has a better solution I'd love to know what it is!
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Ask them to open the gate and let you get a good photo.

The way I get photos at the zoo is to get as close to the fence as possible and shoot with a large aperture so I get as narrow a depth of field as possible. Sometimes it makes the fence disappear or at least easier to remove.

I see the machine is to close to the fence for this to work though. You could remove the fence but it would take MANY hours and chances of it looking great are not good.
 

wornish

Senior Member
Thanks for the input. Not surprised there is no easy fix. Don, I wish I had thought to ask them to open the gate, I certainly will even if the machine is working. Next time!
 

Bob Blaylock

Senior Member
I wonder if some method might be workable, which involved taking several pictures from slightly-different angles, so that the parallax between them would cause the grating to appear in a slightly-different position relative to the subject. Among a properly-taken set of such pictures, every part of the subject would be exposed in at least one.* Perhaps there exists some bit of software that could take such a set of pictures, and reconstruct the unobstructed view of the subject.

There's some part of me that is thinking that if I can find such a subject, with such an obstruction, that I should take a set of pictures in this manner, and then see if either Microsoft ICE or Microsoft Geodesic HDR can do anything useful with them.
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
I wonder if some method might be workable, which involved taking several pictures from slightly-different angles, so that the parallax between them would cause the grating to appear in a slightly-different position relative to the subject. Among a properly-taken set of such pictures, every part of the subject would be exposed in at least one.* Perhaps there exists some bit of software that could take such a set of pictures, and reconstruct the unobstructed view of the subject.

There's some part of me that is thinking that if I can find such a subject, with such an obstruction, that I should take a set of pictures in this manner, and then see if either Microsoft ICE or Microsoft Geodesic HDR can do anything useful with them.
There is a process whereby you can take a series of several shots of a static object and "average out" things you don't want to see. The best example I've seen was a shot of something like the Taj Mahal where there were a lot of tourists milling about. You take several shots of the building over a period of several minutes, using a tripod of course, and then import each shot into Photoshop as its own layer. Photoshop merges all the shots into one layer after "averaging" them. This averaging process looks for elements that show up in ALL the layers. Anything that shows up in only one or two layers is removed auto-magically by Photoshop. The resultant photo is one of the Taj Mahal without a single tourist in sight because no single tourist was present in all the shots. I've never used the technique myself, I've only seen it done a couple of times.

For this to work, however, the subject matter has to be absolutely static; at least as I understand it.

Edit: Here's a quick and dirty tutorial on what I'm talking about: Remove People From Your Photos
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