Day 17: OOB

Oliver's comin' out the box, yo!

I tried a new technique I'd read about on the DPS Forums - Out of boundary photos. To make it vaguely picture-of-the-day-ish, I used the picture of Oliver from day 10.

I followed Serrator's excellent OOB Tutorial. Every step was clearly illustrated and described.

Why this picture wasn't a great choice for OOB

• In the original pic, Oliver's left ear was cut off at the top of the frame, so out of necessity, I needed to keep it within the frame of the OOB, which makes the OOB look unfinished.
  
• The whiskers... I will never use a subject with fine-grained details like that again. Masking around them was impossible because they were thin, tapered to fur-color at the end, and slightly blurred. To compensate, I had to:
  
  • Create a whisker shape with the pen tool and make a selection out of it
  • Position it so it looked like it was continuing where a whisker were on his face
  • Mask out the "whisker"
  • Resize and rotate the selection and repeat with all the bigger whiskers coming off his face
  • After all the whiskers I could handle were masked out, I painted on the layer underneath with the paintbrush, opacity set to 20%, to hide the fact that a lot of the "whiskers" I'd created were actually on his fur
• The picture was slightly blurred from camera shake, which made the contrast between Oliver's face and the very sharp "frame" even more pronounced.
  
• Between the fur, the blur, and my ineptitude at trying to trace freehand around the face with a mouse, the OOB portions ended up looking somewhat sloppy.
  
• My eye isn't quite good enough to adjust the "frame" correctly for the angle of the original subject.

Lessons learned for next time

• Use a picture with better focus/sharpness
• Use a picture with a more straightforward shape to mask out, or at least a picture with good edge contrast
• Do not use a picture with lots of fine-grained but important details to be masked out, unless I have lots of time or patience
  
• Train myself to recognize the proper frame shape and angle for a given subject
• Possibly drop-shadowing the OOB portion of the picture may be useful in hiding sloppy masking work

Look for me to revisit this on another no-inspiration day.