I often have the problem, especially on pictures taken in the evening or late afternoon hours, that I have the shadow of myself inside the picture.
For example, here:
I find this most of the times annoying. Even though I most of the time accept them as an unavoidable misery.
How do you handle those situations?
One way would be to use a tripod. But often I have no tripod with me because I’m hiking or skiing. And even with a tripod, you would have some shadows in the picture, smaller and therefore easier to retouch, but still.
Is there an easy way to remove these shadows in post processing (ideally by masking them and making these parts brighter, not by retouching them) or are there some tricks to avoid them while taking the picture, without changing the whole scene?
Hallo Uli,
good to see that I am not the only one with this problem!
To make the shadow a bit smaller without using a tripod (because the tripod is at home to save it from getting wet or dirty) I hold the camera overhead. Sometimes GIMP’s Heal Selection does a good job fixing it.
I usually avoid these situations as I often prefer scenes with side or back light. In this case I’d either try to recompose (by ducking down and rising the camera, perhaps also tilting it up) to get rid of the shadow, or just accept it.
In order to avoid shadows like this, I typically squat down and shoot from a lower angle, or just pick a different composition.
In order to fix shadows like this, I would probably us masking to select the shadow, and then I “relight” it using and additional instance of color calibration (to warm it up similarly to the sun-exposed snow) and an additional exposure module, and whatever else I need (Maybe some retouching in order to better hide the shadow border, which would probably be very difficult to mask perfectly).
I guess my lack of skill with DT is going to show through here, but I have never been able to acceptably remove a shadow like that by lightening it alone. In my experience, you can make it less noticeable sometimes, but never remove it without a heal brush.
Yeah, you can’t just crank the brightness up - you’d need to reconstruct the shadows on objects that you covered with your shadow and ensure accurate colors of the sunny parts too
Hmmm what about taking a step sideways and taking another photo? You could use the second photo as a source for the covered area to cut-and-paste it back to the original. It will not have the same perspective, but you could fix the perspective in GIMP or wherever you can find a deform mesh. Not sure if I explained it well, but this should work.
It’s only for flat ground and probably won’t work if you cover detailed objects with your shadow, but that’s the best I can think of
That’s a good idea! I will try that next time when I have such a situation. My main problem with retouching is often that I don’t have similar areas for the healing tool. Taking it from a minimal different perspective could solve this problem.
I think at least in this particular photo, you could crop out most of your shadow. With that said, the only answer without changing the angle of the scene would be longer lens and further away, that’d also have the effect of bringing those nice background mountains “closer” which might be nice.
If you only had the (assumed) wide lens, circling around that house would help, but doesn’t satisfy your initial request.
