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Testimonial

"You know, the last time a Photoshop tool made me do a double take and stare in amazement is when I first tried EasyS a few years back. I just tried out EasyDS and I was wowed yet again. Such a simple interface, yet the results are fantastic! I'm not talking about a subtle difference here, I did an A/B comparison and what I thought was sharp turned out to be pretty blurry :) And EasyDS does this without the usual ugly artifacts. Great job! P.S. Before trying to use exotic sharpening plugins or raw converters, photographers really need to look into your sharpening plugins. Their images will look better and they'll save a bundle." - Robert G. June 2009

This article is based on a section from our new book "Phone Artistry".

Over the last years we have written a lot about Texture Blending (see our Texture Blending Resources page).

Here is an image we like and at the same time it has a major flaw.

iPhone photo from 6x6 app

We like the Gauge for its textures and colors. Unfortunately the background is very cluttered and busy. So we thought to replace the background.

We started by extracting the gauge itself using a simple circular Marquee with some extra feathering.

Extracted Gauge with slight feather

We used our Texture Blending script to add a seamless background. The texture itself is a commercial texture called "Beowulf" from FlypaperTextures.

"Beowulf" Texture

As you can see textures often are beautiful abstract images by themselves. Here we used it as part of our Texture Blending process. After blending and some further contrast tuning we got this result.

Texture Blending Layer Stack (generated from our script)

Final Version "The Gauge"

Now we can enjoy the Gauge without the nasty background. It nearly looks as if we photographed it with this background. The "Gauge" made it even as a candidate for our Selected 2011 Images.