While we were standing on the ditch-bridge beyond the old, stilted Rothschild’s Bungalow at Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve trying to catch a glimpse of the Purple Emperors wheeling high above is in the oak trees, a mammal squeaked near our feet and poked its head out to see what all the fuss was about. It was a Least Weasel, it seems.
Its scientific name is Mustela nivalis, although it is often known as the Little Weasel, Common Weasel, or in some places simply a Weasel. In the US the term weasel is more generic and applies to a whole range of creatures. Not to be confused with Mustela erminea,that’s stoatally different although not weasily distinguished. Hahahah.
Anyway, as is the wont of these small carnivores, they might pop out into the open, as did this one, before quickly disappearing back into the tangled undergrowth. But, they almost always come back out within a second or two for another look as did this one, before it plopped into the ditch water swam the few feet across and could be heard scuffling on the other side before disappearing for good.
The upshot of all this peeking and scuffling is that I wasn’t quick enough to get the first shot of the creature standing on the bridge near our feet, but I got a sneaky shot of her after she made her second appearance. Unfortunately, there was a blade of blurry green grass right in front of her. I found a Photoshop tutorial on how to remove such distractions, but the techniques didn’t translate easily to PaintShopPro, although I had a go and managed to decolourise the blade so it was brown and slightly less distracting than the green.
I posted the image on Twitter to confirm the species but also to ask if anyone knew of a simple way to remove blurry blades of grass. Various people replied with PhotoShop suggesttions. But, like I say, I use PaintShopPro rather than that pricey Adobe subscription product. Twitter friend Chuck Baggett offered the best solution. A free, beta-testing AI tool from the very same Adobe, known as Firefly. It’s a generative art tool akin to Dall-E and MidJourney, AI apps I’ve discussed at length here previously.
Firefly has an object removal tool within its repertoire. You set an appropriate brush and simply paint over the object you want to remove. Chuck did the job for me on the version of the weasel, I’d tweeted. But, I obviously wanted to test the app myself, so I uploaded a JPG rendering of the DNG output I’d created with DxO PureRaw3 from the original camera RAW file. Set a brush up and painted out the green blade of grass and some of the other distracting fronds. There were some odd artefacts visible when viewing the eye close-up, but they were relatively easy to fix in PaintShopPro without having to start from scratch in the Firefly AI app.
I can highly recommend Adobe Firefly for removing such problems from your photos. Much quicker and easier than the various approaches offered for PhotoShop. The app adds a watermark that declares the image was generated with an AI app, but I think in this case it’s quite fair of me to crop out that declaration given then I was simply manipulating my own photo with a digital brush! Obviously, the Firefly system can generate artwork from text descriptions just as Dall-E and MidJourney do and those generative images probably should be declared as such in some circumstances.