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Happy Thanksgiving!


	Happy Thanksgiving! This time of year, this tom turkey is thankful he lives in a zoo. Living Desert Zoo, New Mexico The highlights in the background were really blown out, so I constructed a wall in photoshop (see discussion for details) ISO 100 f/2.8 1/100sec @ 24.2mm Feedback Greatly Appreciated! Pamela K
	Turkey before Same as Happy Thanksgiving! before I added the wall. Pamela K

Pamela K

The background was really blown out, so I created a wall in Photoshop using the following steps:

1) I selected around the turkey by using the magnetic lasso followed by zooming in and using the lasso tool to get what I missed. I also selected a straight line across the ground to leave as a place for the turkey to walk.

2) I duplicated the background layer so I could adjust the background separately from the turkey.

3) I copied a piece of the real stucco wall from the background, darkened it, and used that as a pattern to fill in the background.

4) To get rid of the repetitiveness, I filled again using the standard gravel pattern in darken mode at 25% and then again with a pattern of solar granules using the linear burn mode at 15%. This made the wall look patchy like a real stucco wall.

5) To make the lighting pattern on the wall match the original background lighting, I used the lighting effects filter. I also burned along the bottom of the wall.

6) To remove blown out highlights in the dirt, I cloned over the back part with dirt from the lower left.

7) I then erased the turkey from the copied layer and adjusted the brightness, contrast, and color separately for the background and the turkey.

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November 23, 2006

BetterPhoto Member

Beautiful job, Pamela! Thanks for giving us a beautiful portrait of such a lucky Bird!!!