Seeker23 Nice going on that watermark removal! Unfortunately, You missed the watermark on the bill (tip) of her cap. Sometimes they are really hard to spot! "Where's Waldo?" Eat your heart out.
XenoHaze Nice work on those watermark removals! I feel your pain.
Sometimes there are slight light filters over the different variations so you can't exactly use the same watermark removals on multiple variations.
Not sure who it would help, but I'll add a few tips here that may allow people using photoshop to remove watermarks faster
Step 1:
Import essential layers from the PSD which would help (PSD's provided are normally half the size of the painting, so go to Image>Image Size, set the attribute on the right to pixels and enlarge to however many pixels the painting is at, for example, Mai's height was at 3600 pixels, so set it to that)
Then duplicate layers by right clicking on the selection of folders and indicating which open document that you wish to duplicate them to...your document should them look like this
Step 2a:
Look in the PSD layers and locate any watermarks that exist; Ctrl+Click that layer to obtain a selection as shown below (Isolating the watermark itself is mandatory, but showing this to caution that it is sometimes hidden in other layers)
Step 2b:
If you cannot locate the watermark itself, or as seen above, the watermark selection is not the one in the painting, you will have to manually make a selection either by using the lasso tool, or what I favor usually by creating a layer and filling it in with a contrasting color, add a mask to it and start painting in the watermark area selection (Alt+Click the mask to see the area that would show up in Black/White)
Step 3:
Once you have the selection complete, Select>Modify>Expand and input somewhere 1-3 pixels to enlarge selection, then blur it by using Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur with somewhere around 2.8 value
If your selection was done by lasso tool, the feathering option would do, or if you forgot to set that before you made the selection, you can go into the Select and Mask menu as shown below...the values you can self determine
When everything's done you will see the edges blurred
Step 4a:
If you manage to find a usable background in the PSD layers, make a copy of that (here I found that by showing only the edit and bg folders in the PSD, the resulting image is close to the background in the painting, so I decided to Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E to get a new layer of all visible merged, then use the mask/selection obtained from previous steps in order to confine this layer to covering only the watermark area
However, as seen below, the merged image is still slightly different to the painting that it shows up with a weird border, so the simplest method is to clip a few adjustment layers to that and modify accordingly...of course it won't be final, so painting over that afterwards will also be a must
Step 4b:
If you don't have the PSD or did not find any usable background, then simply use content aware while having the watermark area selection active and pressing Shift+Backspace to get a content aware fill...results will be different from the original background given it's AI deduced, but you won't need to adjust the hue or brightness as much and simply focus on painting over the weird parts
Since this is simply a problem solving task, the solutions are many and you really don't have to follow the steps to a T unless it improves your workflow...but a lot of people tend to not be able to deduce proactively so writing this here as a reminder...use this however you want lol
You did a great job with the NFT version, what did you use to upscale it? I saw a version somebody uploaded with AI Gigapixel but it looked blurry and bad, this version you did look very good compared to it, almost like if it was redone in high res
I didn't, the image is a screencap from the video, and yeah, I saw the AI upscale a couple posts earlier and decided the tech wasn't mature enough lol
