Another noobie stuck

[CMat]

Hello OPRers!
As the subject indicates, I am working on my first picture and I have come to a block. I am really just looking for some feedback and possible other steps to take. I really don't know what to do around the edges with all the damage and missing info. I know I can add some more color/texture in some of the border-of-damage areas if I spent some more time there, but getting closer to the corners I am at a standstill.
here is what I started with

KnopicS_20_09_4x6 by MagpieMoose, on Flickr

Here's how far I have gotten;

KnopicS_20_09_4x6-wip by MagpieMoose, on Flickr

Any feedback is appreciated, Thanks!
~

[Tori803]

If I were you, I'd ask permission to crop, keeping the same proportions (6x4). I don't see any detail in the damaged areas around the border. If you have a version of Photoshop that supports content-aware fill, use the patch tool in small areas at a time. Select an area with the Patch tool, press Shift + F5 for content-aware fill, and see if it helps. If you grab too large an area at a time it will try to use too much information from the surrounding area.

[CMat]

Thanks so much for the advice. I did that and here is what I ended up with;
KnopicS_20_09_4x6-wip1 by MagpieMoose, on Flickr

Thx again  :wnw:

[Pat]

Hi Cmat, thanks for all the hard work you're putting into this.

If your gallery distributor agrees, it might be helpful to go for an even tighter crop, still keeping to 6x4 and 300ppi as below.  This will give you even less damage to work through.  You want to watch out for clone marks and discrepancies in texture while repairing the more damaged areas.  The patch tool can be very helpful in some areas.  Or as in the case of the pillow, you should be able to repair the less damaged upper corner and then after selecting and making a layer via copy of the repair do an edit, transform, flip and adjust to take care of the smaller but more damaged area of the pillow in the bottom left corner. 

Also you may want to recheck your color correction.  I applied a Curves Adjustment Layer checking black, white, and gray individually.



All the best, pat

[lurch]

Tighter crop might be advisable - but be aware that significant upsampling can make the image fuzzy. That's because the upsampling process cannot create information; it can only interpolate what's already there. You may want to see what your distributor thinks about changing the resolution to, maybe, 240 ppi (which is plenty for a good 4x6 print). DigMyPix might have a problem with that, though.

[Mhayes]

I would agree that a tighter crop might be advisable, but let Quality Control do it. The reason is that when all of the photos are done for a family, QC will compare the final with the original. If something needs to be tweaked, keep the size and the resolution the same.

Do NOT change the resolution and here is where it may get confusing as part of the NY photos were 240 dip and some at 300 dpi. We're good with this, but each family does have to have the same resolution on all their photos. So do not change a 300 print to 240, because all of the others in the family will be 300. This is pretty standard with any print place to keep all your photos to be printed at the same resolution.

Margie