Facebook doesn’t have it easy when it comes to moderating content; with approximately 1.3 billion active users, it’s inevitable there will be a few mess-ups over time. But one issue Facebook has continually struggled with sorting out is the social network's wishy-washy policy on breastfeeding photographs.
When it comes to masking out and/or selecting hair in an image, be it to remove a background or selectively style it, it’s never an easy task. Even with the most tamed of manes, it can be a pain, but thanks to this "Advance Hair Selection Tutorial" by the Photoshop Training Channel, your life is going to get a lot easier.
It’s probably safe to say many -- if not all -- of us know how to remove a background from an image in order to separate the subject of that image. But, thanks to a convenient website called Background Burner, the process has been simplified for when you need speed more than specificity.
The 38-foot-high Gold Ray Dam had spanned Oregon's Rogue River for 106 years by the time Jackson County decided enough was enough. A defunct hydroelectric facility that hadn't been operational since the early 70s, it was one of the last fish barriers still up along the Rogue River. In other words: it had to go.
In the spirit of documenting the experience, the folks at HDRinc decided to employ time-lapse photography to capture the process of methodically tearing down the dam from start to finish.
Here's a tool you may not have heard about but may useful at some time in the future. It's called Clipping Magic, and it's designed to remove backgrounds from user-uploaded pictures.
The concept is rather simple, you upload an image, mark the areas in the background you don't want in red, and mark the areas in the foreground you do want in green. The website's algorithm takes over and (hopefully) produces a background-free picture. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But how does it fare when used for an image with a background you actually want to remove?
When travel photographer Craig Pulsifer accidentally smashed the front of his lens recently and found his lens filter fused firmly to the metal threads, he went to Canon for help. The removal process explained to him by a Canon Professional services technician is probably something most people wouldn't think to try: use a hammer and hacksaw to surgically remove the stuck filter. Pulsifer followed the advice, and found that it works quite well (though he does warn that it's "not recommended for the faint of heart").
If you ever need to remove a photograph that has been glued to paper or cardboard, you can try …
Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill feature was quite a hit when it came out earlier this year, but what about free alternatives? Webinpaint is a web-based photo app that aims to do just that. You simply open up an image, paint over the area you'd like removed, and click the "Inpaint" button for the app to do its removal magic.
From tests I've done with the app, it's pretty clear it doesn't come close to the power of Content Aware Fill. However, for simple photographs without much texture or clutter, the app actually works quite well.