Category Archives: Photography Tips

Have you Grok’d yet? Object Removals

I have signed up for a premium X account to support the platform and to get my work seen by more people  besides GAB, Truth Social and Instagram. The ‘toy’ I like the best on X is the AI solution, named Grok. Initially I thought it was just a search engine that scans the internet to find a few tailored search results. Once I learned that Grok also offers the option help to edit photos, I started to be more interested. This post is focusing on fixing flaws in photos with the click of the mouse

The results are not perfect, but the application is still a beta version. Hopefully it will be improved and be a great tool and avoid having to buy or rent expensive premium software from Adobe and other software developers.

This post is to show how I was able to modify a street photo and have items removed just by telling Grok what to do.

I took this photo while looking for something interesting to photograph I was able to take many close-up photos of this beautiful classic FORD Galaxie and was able to exchange a few words with some residents and the proud owner.

As you can see, there are barricades, the tail light of a parked car, a stop sign and many cars behind the classic car.

 

 

I uploaded the photo into Grok and told the tool what to do. My first attempt was to give a complete instruction with the laundry list of things I wanted to have changed. It did not work properly, even after re-generating the photo several times. Below, from left to right, the commands. By giving commands one at a time, worked fine. Sometimes I had to re-generate several times until Grok got it right.

Step 1: Remove Barricades: Worked like a charm:

Step 2: Remove Distracting Cars. To my surprise, this command also removed the tail light on the bottom left corner.

Step 3: Remove Stop Sign

I also asked to blur the background and to apply a Fuji Velvia filter.  Here you can see the before and after results. If you are looking very closely, the results are not perfect yet as you can see a few subtle variations in the original image vs. the updated final version. I keep playing and ‘discussing’ with Grok to measure the improvement.

Happy Grok’ing

 

 

Lightroom Preset Converter

This is a very quick & dirty post, without too much details. I hope it is simple enough for you to follow.

I am still using an old version of Lightroom and have received free Lightroom presets from one of thee Photography websites that offers presets, tips & tricks. The presets I have received are all in the .xmp format, but my Lightroom version only recognizes .lrtemplate file extension. I did some research and came across an online converter that allows you to comvert .xmp into .rtemplate

The program is very simple, but unfortunately you can only convert one file at a time. The website is http://presetconverter.com and it did the trick for me.

 

 

Just click the ‘Choose template file’ and select convert. The program will convert the file into a .lrtemplate preset which you can download to your computer.

 

 

The program will then prompt you to save the newly converted file to a location of your choosing, in this case, Fujifilm ProPlus II 100.lrtemplate.

 

 

Once you have downloaded the file, you can copy it into your Lightroom Custom Template folder or import it via Lightroom in the Development mode. Open up Lightroom in Development mode, use an existing folder or create a new folder for your newly converted templates and import it into that folder:

The preset will be ready to be used.

The converter is a free to use tool and I have not been able to contact the owner of the tool as I am interested to have a copy of the program in case the person offering this tool is quitting this great too. I will keep looking for it and see if he or she is willing to make it available with all credits or even sell the rights to us.

Loss Prevention: Disk Failure 💻

Every photographer’s worst nightmare. You have thousands of photos stored on your computer or on an external hard drive and this happens. You plug in your hard drive and your computer rejects to recognize it. I had this happening a few times and my Windows based Laptop suggested to format the disc. Not a good idea. I solved the issue by plugging in the hard drive into another USB port and that worked great, but still, a scary moment.

You can also have an issue with your computer crashing, leaving you without your data. Many things can happen to your hard work getting lost. I have all my photos on several external disks and, paranoid as I am, have signed up with an external storage service iDrive with a 5TB plan  that allows me to setup all my devices for daily backups plus having an iDrive where I can upload my images from my external hard drives.

I like this solution as I can access my images on the go. Imagine you are traveling and want to access a photo you took some time ago. Having these images at your fingertips where ever you have an internet connection comes handy.

Sign up with iDrive today to get your photos and data safely backed up and get a big discount on your 1st year subscription. Note, this website does generate some commissions from our partners that covers a small portion of the costs involved to keep this website up & running. Please come back for more information about other services iDrive is offering

 

 

 

 

Object removal made easy!

Sometimes, when you take a photo, you see objects or imperfections you want to have removed easily and quickly. Maybe you have a beach photo and want to remove an unsightly person or object, you broke up with your ex and want him/her removed from the photo. Most if not all photo editing software tools have the healing option that comes as standard. But what if you don’t have any of these sometimes expensive photo editing programs/apps? What options do you have? I came across an online photo editor years ago, but have not used all the options to date, until the developer of this tool introduced me to their Smart Object Removal tool. At first, I thought it would be one of the healing tools that basically replace one area of your image with another area of your photo. This doesn’t work all the times as the area you want to match doesn’t fit into the area you want to remove.

This article shows you on how to remove objects easily using the ‘Smart Object Removal’ option in Lunapic. A few weeks ago I took a photo of a street sign at a local Antique store and did not pay attention to the price tag attached to the object. I didn’t care too much about it, but thought: “Well, this might be a perfect image to try out how ‘smart’ this Object Removal tool is”

Here we go:

Visit the Lunapic website and upload your image. Select ‘Edit -> Smart Object Removal’ and with your mouse or finger (if you use a tablet, smart phone), select the area you would like to have removed – click the ‘Remove’ option to have it removed completely.

After the removal, the object is gone and you don’t notice anything that would suggest, that there was something there. A picture perfect result. You can then save the image in many formats, such as PNG, GIF, JPG and more and can also define the size of your image. These options will be outlined in a future post.

Below, the ‘before and after’ results side by side. Now you can easily remove watermarks, objects, people and other imperfections from your photos with a few mouse clicks.

 

 

Imagery Theft on Social Media

First and foremost. Before you report anyone for imagery theft, make sure that you are 100% sure the image you report is YOURS. Nuances, like different lens, lights on buildings are different, or other objects and people of the images are different. Wrongly accusing someone of theft can be used against you and you may be sued for defamation!!

Being on social media and publishing and sharing your work  helps to get you noticed and sometimes become famous. Having a lot of followers with lots of likes and sharing your images makes you feel good. However, there is also a downside sharing your work. It doesn’t matter if you put a watermark as there are people with bad intentions out there. I came across an issue where a photographer started a discussion on sharing photos without giving credit to the photographer on Twitter. The perpetrator in question not only misappropriated images, but also  cropped photos so that AI Image search services would not find the photos and also removed watermarks. After doing a deep dive into this, I noticed that the Twitter profile in question stole many photos, telling these were all the thief’s own photos, taken in Vancouver, Canada. The problem was, that some of the birds probably don’t even exist in Canada (one photo apparently taken in Canada was actually taken in Scotland by a well known Wildlife photographer. You cannot make this s#it up!

In this particular case, someone wanted to cause damage to a photographer by impersonating them. This is a very bad thing to do. I am not sure if the perpetrator was identified and caught, but as you can see, we live in a clown world today.

Once you call the individuals out, they will most likely block you and continue their shenanigans with the same account or setup another social media account. Oftentimes they also use the name of well established photographers and impersonate them. They may even want to defraud innocent people into buying the stolen photos to make a quick buck or two. Never purchase anything from unknown people until you did a thorough background check and also talked with the artist personally over the phone (Zoom / Google meet).

Fortunately, you are not alone and your fellow photographers will most likely give you a heads up if they see your work being ‘stolen’ by others. You may be able to hire a lawyer and submit a Cease and Desist Letter to the person committing a Copyright Infringement, but with Twitter allowing anonymous accounts, may be difficult and costly to do. Probably best to report the infringement to the Social Media operator and have the account committing the Copyright infringement terminated. The perpetrators will most likely setup another account and start the scheme all over again.

One thing you can do is to be vigilant and use tools like images.google.com and/or TinEye.com To be honest, TinEye doesn’t work great for me and I had more luck finding copyright infringement cases via images.google.com

I hope this article was somehow helpful and gives you some insight on the issues that can arise when you upload your photos on social media. In some cases, your photos can be used for nefarious causes and get you into troubles as you are the copyright owner of the photo, especially if you share photos with recognizable people and/or property. Just be vigilant and careful with what you share. For covering you from a legal side, you can see if the “Contracts & Forms Bundle for Photographers” works for you. (sponsored link).

Fortunately, this episode had a happy ending as of the writing of this article, the account of the perpetrator has been deleted.

 

 

 

 

Please make sure that you are 100% sure that your imagery has been misused before you report anyone. This happened to me. I posted a picture I was proud of on 500px. Shortly after posting it, a fellow photographer I have been following for 10 years contacted me to remove HIS photo immediately. We discussed the issue and came to the conclusion, that we were at the same event at the same time and took the same picture. We were standing next to each other without knowing each other personally.

Be your own judge. I took the image on the left with my Nikon D5300, 55-300mm lens. Scott, the other photographer took the photo on the right with this, I believe D500, 150-600mm Tamron gear.

Image

The subtle nuance of the surfers posture and EXIF information cleared up the situation and there was no need to block or shame each other. Some photographers may not take it lightly if accused by mistake and file a defamation lawsuit against you.

In addition to my 5 cents, you can read the below article found on Contrastly.

Here is a detailed article talking about this topic: