Pest Control

November 25, 2019 – Africa Blog #8

Adobe Photoshop has an arsenal of tools available for the digital artist. The gem of the collection, in my opinion, is the Spot Healing brush. Every image I take into post-processing gets a once-over with the Spot Heal tool, erasing gray smudges caused by dust on the camera sensor and removing ‘distractions’ in the image that detract from its overall artistic merit – things like stray hairs, a twig in the wrong place, a brown spot on a flower petal. However, the Spot Heal brush had to rise to new heights to deal with the collection of photos I brought home from Africa. The wildlife in Africa is plagued by insects. Flies by the hundreds cling tenaciously to the animals’ bodies. Ticks bite into their underbellies. Our powerful zoom lenses bring these aggravating bugs into sharp focus and no one wants to see a portrait of a lion marred by the congregation of insects clustered on his face. Photographs I captured of an impala at a dead run, fleeing for its life from an attacking cheetah, showed the flies along for the ride – not even dislodged by his high-speed stampede. I captured a lovely close-up head shot of a cheetah, but when I zoomed in to inspect, I found the ubiquitous freeloaders crawling through her fur. Ugh!Spot healing to the rescue – one by one those unsightly insects are zapped until only the fresh bug-free visage of the animal remains. It’s a tedious process, and maybe the resulting images are guilty of portraying wildlife through rose-colored glasses, but honestly – which would you prefer?

Before

After