Photo Edit Tried a difficult subject removal.

[MentosCubing]

The shading on the ground is very wonky, but I could not find a way to fix that. I tried doing luminosity corrections to every sample I placed, and it didn't turn out very well. I tried some other stuff with blend modes and other tools, but nothing looked good. The best I could come up with was to run a high pass filter over the ground, turn the radius up as high as I could without seeing the weird shading, change the blend mode to Overlay, and put it on top of a gradient made from two sampled colours. It looks better than it did before, but it's still really bad. If anyone has a suggestion for that, I'd love to hear it. Aside from the floor, I think it turned out excellently, but that floor is just so bad that the entire image is ruined.

Of course, if you notice another flaw, I'd love to hear about it. The floor is the only one I've noticed, but there could be others.

 

[Rich54]

Have you tried Frequency Separation? I took your Despues (After) image and applied Frequency Separation to it. For the Blur layer I used a Gaussian Blur of about 40 pixels. Once I created the High Frequency layer I then copied it again so that I had two High Frequency layers, which gives extra sharpening in the brick pattern. Then, immediately above the blur layer, I used the brush tool to create smoother colors and remove some of the "wonky" shadows that you don't like.

(By the way, when you said that you applied an extreme High Pass filter on top of a gradient, I believe that is a similar idea to Frequency Sparation. But Frequency Separation works better.)

Generally, I think you did an excellent job with this because I agree that it's a difficult one. My only criticism is in the areas that I circled in red, which I think are too blurry. All the other seams nearby (where the sidewalk meets the wall) are sharper than what we see in the areas circled in red.

Rich

 

[MentosCubing]

Have you tried Frequency Separation? I took your Despues (After) image and applied Frequency Separation to it. For the Blur layer I used a Gaussian Blur of about 40 pixels. Once I created the High Frequency layer I then copied it again so that I had two High Frequency layers, which gives extra sharpening in the brick pattern. Then, immediately above the blur layer, I used the brush tool to create smoother colors and remove some of the "wonky" shadows that you don't like.

(By the way, when you said that you applied an extreme High Pass filter on top of a gradient, I believe that is a similar idea to Frequency Sparation. But Frequency Separation works better.)

That's right, frequency separation is a thing! I completely forgot that it existed. You're right, though, my high pass experiment was basically the same idea, just executed in a weird and impractical way. Thank you!