Eliminating fencing

Lemurs are fascinating primates from Madagascar. I photographed this one in the Nashville, Tennessee zoo, and the enclosure fence was obviously a problem. I had to shoot through the chainlink fencing, and the same material was behind the lemur. This compounded the problem. The strategy I used to make this look like a shot in the wild involved knowledge of how depth of field works and also a knowledge of Photoshop.

I eliminated the fence between the camera and the animal by doing three things: 1) I used a telephoto lens. In this case, it was the Canon 100-500mm, and this picture was taken at 324mm. The longer the focal length, the better. 2) I used the largest aperture available, which was f/5.6; and 3) I got as close to the fence as possible. All three of these things reduced the depth of field to such a degree that the fence blurred out completely. Had the sun been out, the highlights on the chain-link, even if they were out of focus, would have been a problem that could not be surmounted. The diffused lighting from the overcast sky significantly contributed to eliminating the foreground fence completely.

Before I replaced the background, I had to deal with the fact that the lemur had climbed up on the fencing material. That certainly didn’t look

natural. So, I went into my ‘components’ folder and opened the ‘trees’ folder. Here I found a suitable tree and pasted that over the left side of the image. This completely covered up the unattractive fence. I had to be careful to retain the detail in the lemur’s thumb.

For the background, I could have used Topaz Mask AI to retain the fine hair detail as a new background was composited with the image, but I didn’t think it would do a good job. The way the lemur’s body was up against all that metal fencing would make it extremely difficult for the Topaz algorithms to create a perfect selection.

Working in my favor was the green, out of focus foliage background. Even though the chainlink was superimposed over the bamboo forest behind the lemur, the fact that most of the hair was actually in contact with the greenery enabled me to use another technique: cloning from one picture to another.

I searched through my dozens of images of out of focus foliage and found one I thought would work. I opened this picture at the same time the shot of the lemur was open. So, the two photos were open on the desktop in two separate windows side by side.

Activating the image of the out of focus foliage and choosing the clone tool, I held down the option key (alt key on a PC) and clicked in a part of the picture from where the clone tool would begin copying pixels.

I then activated the image of the lemur and started cloning. To replace the large expanses of the background, I made the size of the clone tool large (using the right bracket key on the keyboard). The challenge, of course, is at the edge of the animal where the fine hair is seen against the background. To deal with this, I enlarged the image to 100%, lowered the opacity of the clone tool to about 75%, and reduced the size of the clone tool using the left bracket key on the keyboard. I then slowly cloned the soft, green foliage against the hair.

To eliminate each section of metal where it touched the hair, I used the clone tool to cover that up with sections of hair that had the green foliage behind it.

See the screen capture above to understand what I’m talking about. The red arrow indicates the area where the reddish hair of the lemur meshes with the out of focus foliage in the background. I cloned this small area of the image to cover up the intersection of the hair with the chain link indicated by the green arrow. This is the only way to solve this problem, and although it’s a bit time consuming because there are so many places where the metal fence interacts with the lemur, the result is worth the effort. §

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