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Always shoot one clean background frame

empty-background-from-portrait-on-location

When working with portraits on location or in the studio, I try to remember to shoot one photo of the background of the scene, without models.

Why?

It comes in really handy when (probably not if) you need to adjust the background, clean it up or remove something completely. Sometimes the client wants me to remove someone from the scene and to fill that space with guesswork is very hard. And takes a lot of time. Content-aware fill is not quite that aware yet.

original-portrait-with-unwanted-extra-in-the-background

This is a good example of a situation that is not uncommon for me. The assignment was to shoot portraits of dentists during their daily routine, and we got a few of their customers/patients to act as extras.

The photos turned out good, but then they asked me if I had any shots with the (pixelated) female dentist in that hallway alone, which I didn’t. She needed a portrait for an article and would rather use one without the patient in the background, even if that woman was out of focus.

portrait-on-location-cut-out-on-empty-clean-background

Lucky for me, I had a clean background from the exact same angle, and no complicated details intersected, so it was easily done to cut her out and paste into the empty hallway. It could have been harder to do, if she would have had a big blonde hair for example, or something else that would require more work in Photoshop to get a clean mask. Now I just used the Quick Selection tool.

Cloning can be very useful, and sometimes Content Aware Fill works extremely well, but to guess what is behind someone in a photo is not easy. And cloning areas out of focus is in many ways harder to get right, the human eye is an expert in seeing if something looks a little bit off.

Works in the studio as well

I have this blog post as a note to self, and I try to remember it even in the studio, especially when photographing employees for companies at different times. Getting the light right on the model is one thing, but getting it exactly right on the background as well is a lot harder.

You just have to make sure the light on the area around the head is the same, or just very bright, otherwise the process of cleaning up that part of the photo can become very time consuming. Using this portrait as an example again, it would not be that hard to shoot someone else in my studio (with the same type of light setup, of course) and later combine it with this background.

I could go on and on about the advantages of using this technique, but I guess you get the point. Just remember to do it, the easiest way is to save one of the test shots before your model stands in front of your camera. You could also experiment with different exposures, you never know if you would like the background even more out of focus, and using a real photo instead of Lens Blur is better in many ways.