Quick and easy clean up of a white studio background. Any ideas?

[VivaPhotography]

Normally, I use Lightroom and Photoshop for editing, but having seen the write up in Professional Photo this month about Affinity Photo, I thought I'd give it a try to see if I can save money on the Adobe CC subscription. I'm currently on a trial version of Affinity Photo, so assume that although a professional photographer, I am a new novice user of the product!  ;)

 

One of the most common things for me to do other than colour correction, contrast, saturation, etc. is to clean up white backgrounds. In the studio, I am often using a white infinity cove for portraits of babies, products, families, etc. We all know that white is a real pain for showing up marks, gaining the inevitable scuffs and marks during a shoot that, although not that noticeable to the naked eye, the camera exaggerates. I am looking for a similar quick and easy way to clean those up in Affinity, as I use in Photoshop. The way I do this in PS, is very simple. I create a duplicate layer, select Filter, Noise, Median, with around a 20px radius, select a Hide All Layer and erase the marks on the top layer, which suitably blurs the marks and gives me a pretty clean photo quickly. I've tried a similar process with Affinity, but the results are nowhere near as good as in PS. Maybe I am making a stupid rookie mistake in the way I am doing it, but it is nowhere near as clean and crisp as in PS. Any ideas?

 

It must be a QUICK and EASY approach, so no suggestions of using frequency separation or creating manually selected masks please in any solutions, unless it can be done in 5 mins per photo, as I am often editing photos that the client may not even buy. They are just being given the once over edit for a viewing session, so that they look good enough for the client to choose, but they don't need to be perfect. In the viewing session, the client will choose which ones to buy and those will then be given the full edit. Yes, I know some of you are thinking that I should do the full edit on everything before showing them to the client, but no, I am not in rich London and the South East, where people have money to burn. I am in the North West of England, where incomes are much more conservative and people therefore have less expendable cash. I used to do the full edits on everything and learned the hard way that it was just a waste of my time to do that on 25-30 photos from a session, when the clients were only likely to buy 1-5, which they still do!

 

Regards,

 

Gordon

[anon1]

"I've tried a similar process with Affinity"

 

Did you use the median blur filter in affinity?

I'd be surprised if the results are different

 

Other than that affinity has a whole bunch of different blur filters

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/16382-does-affinity-photo-have-the-equivalent-of-photoshops-maximum-minimum-filters/

Bilateral blur is the same as PS surface blur and might work as well

 

Cheers

[dmstraker]

I'd use select brush on the background, then a one-shot refine or shrink to ensure subject not caught, then do a blur (perhaps an average). Around a minute to do this.

 

Am I missing something?