Caturday Art: The Polishing a… Ahem! Edition

Not every terrible photo is salvageable, but every so often my human finds one that she thinks has “possibilities.” Case in point: the orange and white rescue kitten she photographed at some event a couple of years ago. Can you believe she actually thought this would make a good faux oil painting?

The photo is way too dark, it is out of focus, and once she cropped and lightened it, there were even more problems — the carpet the cat was on was a mess! Plus there was another cat’s foot in the corner. With a big object like that, it’s hard to erase it in Photoshop with the Clone Stamp or the Spot Healing Brush tool. But there is a quick way to get rid of these types of things. It’s as easy as surrounding it with the Lasso tool (its shortcut is L).

Once you have the marching ants around the offending object, go up to the Edit menu and click on the Fill command in the drop down menu.

Now, here is the important part. When the next window opens, you want to make sure to use the Content Aware option. It will fill in the area to match everything that surrounds it.

It works (most of the time), almost like magic!

My human cleaned up the rest of the photo with a combination of the Content-Aware Fill, Spot Healing Brush and Clone Stamp. Now it does not look half bad. This is what she refers to as “polishing a turd” (hence the title of this blog post). Then, she took the easy way out and filtered the photo through the AKVIS ArtWork software that she used for my Caturday Art post a couple of weeks ago. This time, she used the Oil Painting filter. And you know what? It does make a pretty cool oil painting!

For more Caturday Art, visit Athena!
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