Today I’m sharing a particularly challenging photo edit I worked on recently. Sometimes putting extra time into something can really pay off.

When I visited the Museum of the American West in Lander, Wyoming last year, I took a couple pictures of an art piece entitled The Confrontation. I marveled at the detail the artist, Tess Diaz, created with thousands of tiny glass beads.

Here are the two pictures I took that day, shown with no editing. As you can see, the bright light and many reflections hid the beauty of the work.

Did you notice the full-length reflection of me taking pictures in one of them? 🙂

Corel PaintShop Pro 2021 is the program I used to edit the photo. I’ve used this program for many years, and I’m on my third version. I like it because it has so many possible tools to use and because you buy a full version and don’t have to pay a monthly fee. Additional tools are available for purchase

Here’s a photo of the home screen with my unedited picture.

Tools used in this challenging photo edit

After choosing a picture to edit, the first tool I used was for perspective correction. See how the frame appears shorter at one end in both pictures? This tool fixes that distortion. Then I cropped the picture down in size.

Next, I decreased the contrast significantly and used backlighting to darken the overall image even more. I sharpened the entire image as well. I used the airbrush tool with black paint to get rid of everything around the edges.

The hard part came next. I used the scratch remover and cloning tools to eliminate reflections. Then I used the paintbrush tool to load my brush with matching colors located next to other areas I was attempting to cover. I softened some of the edges in areas that were too hard to edit. This is where having a little artistic talent comes in handy for a challenging photo edit.

At one point, I was going to try to separate the Native American warriors from the soldiers. Here is how that turned out. I also cut off the informational plaque. No, I didn’t like how that turned out at all!

Since the blog post I planned to use this on was about bringing us together, despite our differences, I didn’t think separating the parties would work. In that post, I was trying to highlight our differences and similarities. I continued editing the full piece.

Here is the final product. I estimate it took two hours to complete all of the edits.

Can you see why I thought it was worth salvaging?

Sunday Stills – Photo editing: fun or fraught?