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I ran across this Cooper's hawk in Long Beach, at a little preserve surrounded by golf courses. My wife and I were wandering through the 100 acre preserve, and saw him sitting on this branch, above a stream. Needless to say, I wanted to get a picture of him without disturbing him too much. I shot the photo with a 100-400 mm Image Stabilizing zoom lens, bracing my body up against a tree and an ant trail. The ants were not amused.

However, when I took the photograph, I knew I would need to do some work on the image:

This is a portion of the original image. Note the very large branch sticking out of the hawk's head. There was really no way of moving to remove the branch from the background, so it became a photoshop moment.

The original image is around 5400 x 3700 pixels. I scanned the Kodak Gold iso 200 negative in at 4000 DPI, cropped it down do the size I wanted. My intention is to be able to reproduce this at 18x12 inches.

The first thing I did, and possibly the most painful part, was to create a mask for the hawk.

The first thing to do was create a series of layers, these are:

  • Foreground layer -- the actual layers used for the Hawk.
  • Mask Layer -- You can't see it, but this is the mask for the hawk. It was a white layer, I set the opacity to around 50 percent, and erased the hawk.
  • Red Layer -- Used to give me fine detail on the mask layer. Easier to see than white.
  • Background Layer -- Once I had the mask layer, I created a layer mask on a duplicate of the Foreground. This provided the background image when combined with the Foreground.

Here I erased the white portions of the Mask Layer. I would zoom in to 2:1 or more to make sure I removed only what I wanted. This left the hawk and branch, the foreground image. I would take a different filter approach on the foreground image compared to the background image.

In particular, removing the branch would cause some variations that were visible, and by blurring the background, adding in noise to replace the grain removed by the blur, I could set it up so that you could not tell the branch was removed.
This image is representative of the steps I took to remove the branch. Over all, it took many hours to completely remove the branch from the images.

1) I used the clone tool to paint over the branch. I have the clone tool set at about 50 percent opacity, and with the Wacom tablet I use, I can also adjust that by the amount of pressure I apply. This would take several passes to remove the branch, but I find I work better using this method than using the clone tool at 100 percent.

2) Here I have used a Gaussian blur of 21 pixels to blur out the image in the select box. For the actual image, once I had removed the branch, I blurred out the entire background.

3) Note that the grain that is present as noise is missing from the selected area, and needs to be added back in. Here I have added in noise to the image. playing with the amount to get approximately the right look as the background noise.

4) However, this noise that I have added is more sharp than the background noise. So I blurred out the noise by applying a Gaussian blur of radius 0.8.
Once I had removed the branch from the background image, I was then able to merge the various layers, the foreground of the hawk and branch, and the background image. This left the final result shown at the top of this page.