Using the overlay track to mask grafitti

[jparnold]

Yes I recently used the overlay track to mask some bad grafitti which I had not noticed when I 'shot' a particular scene while in Wales (at Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower peninsula) and I thought that I would share how I did that.
Firstly this method will only work if the camera was held completely still when the scene is shot (I was using a tripod).
The scene was of my wife walking through the 'doorway' of the ruins of Pennard castle.
The following is a frame from that clip suitably modified to cover the (offensive) grafitti.

Using this same frame and Paint Shop Pro I selected a small part of the brick wall which was similar to the part containing the grafitti and turned the remainder of the image to a single color . The result is as follows -

I then placed the original clip on the timeline and the image I created using Paint Shop Pro onto the overlay track moved the image so that the bricks covered the grafitti and set the 'transparent' colour to the purple color and voila the grafitti is gone see below -

Remember that this will only work if the camera was NOT moved when the scene was taken.

[timhief]

Great tip.

[alpine]

Very well done

[sjj1805]

Well done, good tip.

[jparnold]

I must admit that I made a slight mistake in the method used to get rid of the grafitti although the method described above would still work if there was another part of the scene (stone block in the instance) to cut which matched where I wanted to use it.
You will be able to detect that the area where the grafitti was does NOT match any other part of the wall.

I remembered after posting that what I did was to use the CLONE BRUSH (Paintshop Pro or any other good image editor) to change the area where the grafitti was with a similar part of the picture.
I then used the SELECTION took to select only the area where the grafitti was.

Space and time prevents me describing how to use the CLONE BRUSH but there should be many tutorials around describing it's use.

I only wanted to share how it is possible to get rid of something not wanted.