Lacock Positive: Lacock Positive 14th November

In this meeting we reviewed results from the five club members who, earlier this year, travelled to London for a dance shoot with Panikos Hajistilly of Panikos Photography.

The problems faced were that the studio was quite small, thus flash units, softboxes and lighting stands tended to intrude into images. This meant either attempting to clone them out, or use Lightroom's AI remove tool.

Those who had tried AI remove, found results could be unpredictable with almost everyone saying it would often replace a flash unit with a slightly different flash unit, or a lighting stand with a slightly different lighting stand.

Other problems were that the white backdrop used in some of the shots was "well used" and had very many marks and scuffs. Also the model sported a large number of small tattoos, which some members felt they needed to remove in post.

Jumping dancer, showing intrusion of lights and supports © Danny Wootton

After post processing © Danny Wootton

One member was a bit more extreme, extensively using Photoshop's "liquify" tool to provide a slimming effect, together with its AI generative fill to add flowing hair

Liquify filter applied © Tony Bamford

Generative remove was especially useful in this shot where the material used wandered well beyond the backdrop:

Dancer before processing © Phil Male

Generative fill was also quite inventive here when (without prompting) it replaced the studio lights with a curved window:

After processing © Phil Male

Converting to black and white also worked well:

Dancer before processing © Phil Male

Dancer in black and white © Phil Male

Replacing the background in post was an option which was actively encouraged by Mr. Hajistilly himself. However, due to the large amount of work needed to select the dancer (neither Lightroom, nor Photoshop do a sufficiently good job without lots of time-consuming help) only two members attempted this: