Preparing Photos for Competition Part Three
Getting the Images Ready
Your goal here is to make your image as pleasing to the judge as you can. Your image needs to have unambiguous intent. Meaning that everything in the image must serve the goal you have set out in making the image. I will be looking at how to remove distractions form the image and highlight subject.
What are distracting elements?
Basically anything that takes the audiences attention away from what you really want them to look at. These can be:
Attention Grabbers
Your photo should have a subject and you are trying to showcase or tell a story about it. Anything that draws the viewer's attention away from your subject and it’s story are distractions and should be avoided, removed or diminished. Here are some of the classics.
Bright areas and objects
Our eyes are designed to be attracted to bright objects for some reason. This is why babies are often attracted to screens and bright windows. In a photo we are most likely to see the brightest objects first so it is important to make sure it is your subject. Anything in the image that is overall brighter than your subject is likely to attract more attention.
Highly saturated areas and objects
Similar to bright objects, highly saturated objects will draw your attention first. The TVs in your local electronics store have their saturation set to its highest setting and they will usually use highly saturation footage in their demonstrations to attract you to them. Also high visibility safety clothing uses this same principle to make workers stand out from the environment.
Things that intersect your subject
Thin objects and lines that pass behind, or worse in front of, your subject can be very distracting. Sometimes it can look like they are ‘skewered’ by the line or it can just spit the subject up making it look less cohesive. To make images easier for the eye to ‘read’ it’s best to separate the subjects in your scene unless overlapping objects is important to the theme or story telling.
Objects intruding on the borders of the image.
Anything that is poking into your image from outside the frame can distract from your scene or just make it look untidy or messy. This can include grass, sticks, tree branches, people, animals or anything that isn’t part of the image or story. When something is on the border it is hard to tell if it is meant to be there or not so either include it fully in the image or take it completely out. It’s a good practice to do a ‘border patrol’ around the edge of your image to make sure everything is clean.
Suspension of disbelief breakers
When making an image you are trying to tell a story and sometimes items in your image can break the illusion you are creating. Some things that can break your image are:
Out of place objects including rubbish and natural litter and unattractive infrastructure (A/C Units, vents and drains).
Objects that don’t match your photos theme. i.e. An iPhone in a fantasy image.
Photography equipment.
Really bight objects
Objects in or areas of the photo that are a bight or clashing colour
Things poking in from the edges of the image
Out of place items like rubbish, stray leaves, people in the background
Writing that isn’t part of your subject or story
Crooked horizon lines
How to remove distractions
Cropping
Distracting elements on the edge of a photo can sometimes be cropped off to remove them. This can sometimes break your nice composition though so use with caution.
Healing/Cloning
In Photoshop there are a range of tools that help remove objects from images. Here are the tools and how to use them:
Clone Stamp: This is the most basic, allow you to sample another part of the image and paint it onto another part of the image. Hold down control and click on the part of the image you want to sample, then brush over the thing you want to go away. It works well when something is evenly lit or fairly uniform. Not so good when you don’t have a close enough sample to use.
Healing Brush: Like the clone tool, you select part of your image and you can paint it over the top of the distraction but this one will also try and blend the two parts of the image seamlessly together. This can be really good at blending out hard edges left behind by Content Aware Fill or the Spot Healing Brush.
Spot Healing Brush: This works like the healing brush but it will automatically find a sample within the image to use thus making it a lot faster to use. However you do have less control over what you get. Just paint over what you want to remove with this brush trying to make sure you cover all of it and wait to see what happens. If you don’t like the results undo it and try again. Sometimes it doesn’t work very well so you need to try the Healing Brush or the Clone Stamp to make it work.
Content Aware Fill: This is like the Spot Healing Brush but you can apply it to larger areas more easily. It now comes with a new interface that gives you a lot of control over how this works. Make a selection around the object you want to remove and select Content Aware Fill from the edit menu and it is usually gone. In the control interface you can choose what parts of the image you want to to try and take samples from and it gives you a live update on your results. Keep trying different sample combinations and if it isn’t quite right you can often clean it up with the Healing Brush.
Changing colours
When you have something that is just the wrong colour you can always try the good old Black & White conversion but if you want to keep your colours there is a lot you can do. Photoshop has a colour replacement tool that is designed to quickly replace the colour of something without changing its luminosity. You can make a new layer in photoshop and paint another colour over the top and change that layers blending mode to hue or colour. You can use a hue/saturation adjustment layer and only change the colour you want to remove.
Making your subject shine
Your subject needs to be the most obvious part of your image and there are a few ways to make that happen. Here are some ideas to make it stand out.
Whitest & Brightest
Our eyes are attracted to things that are bright and white so making sure your subject is brighter than the background will help make it stand out. Use the curves or levels layers in photoshop or adjustment brush in Lightroom to reduce the highlights/whites in anything that is too bight. This is why a subtle vignette works really well in most images.
Most vibrant
Like being the brightest, being the most vibrant will help your subject stand out. Often you are better off toning down everything other than your subject then adding a lot of vibrancy to your subject.
Sharpest
We don’t focus on blurry things. Our eyes actively try to bring what we are looking at into focus and when they can’t they assume there is nothing there. Lens makers have spent a lot of time making lenses that will bring something into sharp focus and blur out everything else because it highlights the subject really well. You don’t want to over sharpen in post production but you want to make sure you do some sharpening in post to make it extra tack sharp. You can sometimes get away with post production blurring on your backgrounds but watch how you make your selection and don’t over do it.
Compositional Techniques
There are a group of great compositional techniques that help highlight your subject. See my post on Composition to learn more about that.
Printing Images
If the competition is a print competition you’ll need to make sure your print represents what you want the photo to look like. Check out my guide on printing photos here and I have an explanation of aspect ratios here.
I suggest when it comes to printing you really need to print early and be prepared to reprint your image. Computer monitors do not show all the colours that your can print and you can’t print all the colours your monitor can show. This can cause issues when you print something and there is no detail in the print when you can see it on the computer or you see marks that aren’t very visible on the computer screen. Unfortunately you sometimes can only discover these issues by printing the photo and seeing what happens.
Overall things to remember
Contrast
Our vision is set up to prioritise contrast over colour difference, which is why people with colour blindness don’t have that many serious issues with their vision. If your image lacks contrast then it will often not stand out compared to other images in the competition. You want your histogram to stretch from the blackest point to the whitest point to make sure you have covered the entire dynamic range. Use contrast, clarity and dehaze to make sure you have all the detail you need and sharpen your image.
Overall Luminosity Balance
Judges will often comment about vignettes that are too dark or transition too quickly. There can also be issues with parts of the image looking unnaturally bight or dark because of the use of adjustment layers or brushes. To spot these issues make your image really small and have a look at it for a while. You can more easily see bad vignettes and strange tonal balance when an image is really small.
Read the Rules
Every competition has different rules and you really should make sure you are playing by them or your image will not be looked at no matter how great it is.
Keep a list of competition images
Similar to having a system for cataloguing your images you need to keep a folder on your computer with images that you plan to use in competition. Keeping this list will make it easy to enter more competitions because you are always ready. Also keep a record of what you have entered into which competition and how it went. A post competition debrief can help you prepare for the next one.