Texture clean up question

[SPWA]

I'll be the 1st to admit that I am no photographer, but the more I learn about Photoshop, & Design in general, the more I want to do myself. I wanted a texture today, and couldn't find what I wanted, so decided to take the photo myself.

It is however, a tad grainy. I don't know if there is anything that can be done but I'd like to try & clean it up a bit, & keep some nice depth in the texture itself.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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[Hoogle]

I would say Play with the filters for example On this 1I duplicated the layer then did a denoise on the original with a 4px Gaussian blur. Then set the duplicate layer to luminosity blending mode and reduced opacity to 50%. Note this is converted to jpeg so the quality might not be the same due to this only being 3 meg as to your 17 mb file

 

[Tom Mann]

I hate to sound harsh, but there is no way I would even try to fix this in post processing. The image simply isn't of high enough quality. Even with the most sophisticated processing methods, it will never be as good as if done right in the 1st place.

The real problem with this image is that it's out of focus. A distant second problem is the noise. Other, more minor problems include chromatic aberration in your lens, and either a slight error in alignment between the wall and your sensor, or possibly curvature of field in your lens.

Since there should be no impediments stopping you from re-shooting this correctly, it just isn't worth anyone's time to try to fix it up in PP.

I'm not sure what camera you have, so I can't make recommendations specific to your camera, but almost any camera can do better than this.

Sorry,

Tom M

 

[Hoogle]

Ok I will add to this the lower end cameras will have a difficult time focusing on that kind of image so if you are not confident in manual focusing then do what I use to do when I started doing my own textures and get a bit of black electrical tape and stick it on the wall and adjust your focus point to focus on that section you will get a far greater focus and the black tape can be removed in post production or you can focus lock it remove the tape and retake the shot.

 

[SPWA]

Not harsh at all Tom. I had 2 options iPad or an old Sony Cybershot. I rarely take photos I'm afraid. I went with the Sony. I will take the shot again a few times tomorrow & see if I can't get a better starting image.

The camera may be able to do better, but i'm not sure it was the camera's fault.

@Hoogle. Thx I will bear that in mind. Will give the filters a try on the retakes. Maybe take a bit more time on focusing.

 

[Tom Mann]

That's very sound advice about focusing, Hoogle.

As you were responding to the OP, I was thinking along the same lines and decided to see just how good a common cell phone camera would be at these magnifications, so I took my iPhone 4s over to the curtains, hand held it, and came up with the attached image.

The 1st version is an uncropped view, whereas the 2nd version is a tight crop to 1:1 magnification (ie, one camera pixel = 1 screen pixel). At this mag, the heart shaped designs are about 1 inch high.

To be honest, I expected much worse performance, but this just blew me away. Believe it or not, I never tried this before with my cell phone. One of the things in my favor was that the curtain was back illuminated so the phone had absolutely no problem locking focus.

For the plaster, Hoogle's suggestion of a piece of tape is great, and/or use grazing incidence illumination.

Cheers,

Tom

Attachments: iPhone 4s macro photo of curtains

 

[SPWA]

Thx guys. I tried again with the Sony. I went through the focusing settings, made sure I had plenty of light.. but couldn't get a better outcome. However, with the iPad, the image had less shadow, way less noise, & even close up, the focus looks cleaner. But, the depth of the grooves was less. File size was only 2.3mb also, and not so huuuge like the sony.

The purpose I wanted it for is a texture overlay on a style, and the dark/light contrast on the bumps & grooves needs to be high. The outcome of the style looks better with the poor quality photo.

Big thx for the tips though. If I want to take my own texture images, I think I need a new camera.

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi SPWA -

BTW, I presume that you have Googled {high resolution texture free plaster} and found lots of nice plaster textures like these available on the web:

http://spyrestudios.com/freebies/hi-res-plaster-texture-pack/
http://www.webtexture.net/textures/5-high-definition-plaster-surface-texture/
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/64024
http://www.hdri-hub.com/hdrishop/freesamples/freetextures/item/72-tex-plaster
http://www.brusheezy.com/textures/27382-8-seamless-plaster-textures
http://thinkdesignblog.com/free-textures-12-high-res-plaster-textures.htm

Also, in case it might be of use to you, and for my own education, I took a photo of some painted "dry wall" (aka, plasterboard) at my house using my little Canon G12 (handheld), and turned it into a high rez ( 7296 x 5472 pixel ) seamless tileable texture (see attached low and high rez versions).

It's plenty sharp (zoom in to 1:1 to check), but, to be honest, I'm not very happy with it. The reason is that there is all sorts of microscopic dirt and fibers on the surface of the wall that makes it look noisy even though there is essentially no digital noise on this image.

If I were to do it again, the very 1st thing I would have done is prepared / cleaned the wall before picking up my camera. LOL. In addition, I would have used all the standard motherhood-and-apple-pie techniques for taking good macros including, put the camera on a tripod instead of hand-holding it, used my "real" camera instead of a glorified P&S, manually focused (as recommended by Hoogle), and spent some time getting the lighting right, ie, nice grazing incidence light with minimal fall-off.

Cheers,

Tom

 

[SPWA]

Thx Tom. Yes, I googled for a while to try & find what I needed, my needs were quite specific, plus I would like to start being more self sufficient on the textures. I have made notes about all the things you & Hoogle have mentioned to tackle shots like this, & hopefully I will improve over time. Bookmarked a couple of the links too, for future searching.

The texture you made here will certainly be of use to me, I will be making use of it, & will let you know what it gets used for.

 

[Tom Mann]

I'm glad I was able to help out a bit.

Yes, pls. do post the piece that might use my texture. I'd be very curious to see it.

Best regards,

Tom

 

[SPWA]

This is what I wanted the original image for. I ended up using mine for a different style, as yours gave a far better finish when the appropriate layer fx were added. Thankyou.

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[Tom Mann]

That's way cool! Thank you very much for posting it.

T

 

[SPWA]

Thx for the comment. At least it's better than my photography skills.