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Originally Posted by almost60
Wow, I'm impressed with how well you get rid of the watermarks. I try it with the clone stamp in PhotoShop but it never looks as good as the work you do. How do you do it?
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Originally Posted by bearman14
Yes me also.....
Can you give us your instructions on how you do this .... 
You do a great job! Thank you very much ... |
Thank you both! While I've used PhotoShop on occasion, I normally use PaintShopPro XI for photo editing, only because I'm used to it (however, newer versions of PaintShopPro are terrible, imo)...
Like you alomost60, I use the "clone" tool for editing out signatures and watermarks, and I'll also use the "soften" tool to smooth out the edges between shadows. I'll often snatch areas of pinstriping, clothing folds, grass/dirt/crowd background from completely unrelated parts of the image to make a given section look better.
I suppose the only reason my results look at all acceptable is because I've done thousands of them for my site, so it's been very much a "trial-and-error" experience for me.
I've learned that editing skin/flesh areas is the toughest challenge in this regard because the shading is almost constantly changing, and this holds true for both b&w as well as color images.
I think it's important to remember that, with the ballplayer images, the viewer's eye is immediately drawn to the face first, the uniform second, and everything else is pretty much fill... the face HAS to be as natural as possible, so any editing has to be kept to an absolute minimum... as for the rest, I just try to make everything blend as well as possible.
I wish I had better advice for you, but that's about as accurate a summary of my approach as I can offer.
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Corel's PaintShopPro vs. Adobe's PhotoShop: PhotoShop is, obviously, the best editing software out there, but Adobe's stuff is really, really expensive. Corel's PaintShopPro gives you about 80%-85% of PhotoShop's capabilities, but at a fraction of the price...
here it is on Amazon for $20, for example.
edited to add: if you purchase this software,
make sure you do not buy a version newer than XI... the newer versions do this really weird thing where they load EVERY IMAGE ON YOUR SYSTEM to a gallery each time you boot the software... if you only have 5 or 6 images on your machine, no problem... if you have tens or hundreds of thousands, the process takes many hours, and you cannot do anything else with the software until the process completes. It's just nuts...
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