Partial Editing

How to edit only parts of your picture.

Written by Siegfried Seierlein
Updated on: 24th March 2008

This is one of the most exciting techniques I found and I just love using it. I always knew it should be possible to select only part of a picture and to then edit that so that at the end, the complete picture looks better.I also tried the technique and when finished one could see a line between the existing part of the picture and the edited part of the picture. I then tried very accurate selections to try and prevent this distinct “line” between the edited and the not edited part. Well it did not work.Then one day I saw a video on this technique and could not believe how easy it really was. In this short article I will share the technique with you. You will find the more you use it, the more opportunities you will find to use it. You will even find that your style of taking pictures will change because now you are able to make changes as you like.


	Before


	After

I think one of the most important aspects of photo editing is to, not do to much, or simply said...do not overdo it!! If you carefully look at the two pictures then you will see I upped the exposure in the shaded areas without effecting the sky. I also cropped the picture to change the framing and the effect the picture will have.

When you think about this technique a little then another aspect becomes of interest and that is, can this technique simulate HDR techniques? The answer is, NO, it will never completely simulate the high dynamic range one can achieve with HDR techniques. What it can do, it can increase the dynamic range of a picture with 1 or maybe 2 stops.

If you read the article I wrote on how to measure exposure to prevent high dynamic range blow-outs, then you will also appreciate this article more. The above picture was exposed in such a way that I new I could edit the picture at home to make it nearly perfect.

This technique will also enable you to highlight a subject in your picture. You can for example select a subject in your picture and you can change its color or you can increase its contrast or you can sharpen it, basically anything that will make your subject stand out. When done you can reverse the selection and you can apply a blur to the background to make the subject stand out even more. As I said, the possibilities are endless, all you need to do is to practice and the more you do, the more ideas you will get.

The following is a short description of the Partial Editing technique:


Step 1



		Step 2



	Step 3



		Step 4



	Step 5


		Open the picture you like to edit. Then on the left hand side click on the “free hand” selection tool, its the 6th tool from the top. You will see that there is a small tri-angle at the bottom right of the selection tool. That means you have more than one tool in that location. To access the other, right click with your mouse on the tri-angle and you will see a drop down menu with the other tools. To select the area in the picture you like to isolate or the area you like to edit, use the free hand selection tool to roughly select that area. You do not need to make an accurate selection. The more you practice the faster you will be able to make these selections. See the selection in the picture to the left, its the dotted line...

		As described above the problem with any selection is that it is like a hard line between the selected area and the non selected area. How do we make this selection a soft selection? Go to “Select” on the top menu, then select “Feather” and a dialog box will open. In that box you then need to enter a feather value. What the feather value does, it creates a soft fading area between the selected and the non selected area That then helps not to get that hard line effect between selected and not selected area. For a large selection like the one on the left I normally use a feather value of 80 to 100. Enter the value and press enter. You will see the dotted line will change a little, you now ready..

See in the Photoshop page for more information on the SmartCurve Plug-in for Photoshop. With the smart curves plug-in I increased the exposure as you can see on the left. You can also select the levels function in the enhance menu and by dragging the middle slider to the left or the right you can increase or decrease the exposure.

Next I selected the sky part of the picture. Similar to the bottom part I then applied a feather of 80 to the selection to have it ready for edit.

	Interesting is that when the smart curves function is selected then it will normally only show the selected area in its window. In this step I reduced the exposure of the sky a little

At this point the different parts of the picture has been edited such that it is now possible to edit the picture as one. Now I could crop the picture, add a little contrast and saturation and finally I could apply un-sharp mask.

Its not part of this article, but I like to briefly discuss sharpening as I read somebody saying he prefer not to apply sharpening to his pictures.

Sharpening is an important part of editing pictures. Typically one reduce sharpening in the camera or the camera manufacturer reduce sharpening. That is to prevent loss of detail in the pictures or to prevent any damage to pictures. Compact cameras will for example have more sharpening than SLR cameras. The reason is that SLR owners are more concerned and SLR owners will normally understand what is required to get the most from his or hers pictures.

It is therefor important that you read up on sharpening and that you get to understand how to master sharpening.

I hope you enjoyed the above technique and as I said, the above example is only one of many possible applications for this technique.

Siegfried