Went to zoo recently with my neice. There I took pics of this Clouded Leopard. Sitting in the shadows of a tree, it was barely visible to the naked eye. So I was pretty excited to see its features come pretty clearly in this pic.
But, since it was in a large enclosed cage, the thick wires of the cage were between me and this subject, and there wasnt much space for me to move back and take the cage completely out-of-focus.
You will see the cage wire as diagonal stripes of whitish noise over some sections of the picture (like, over leopard's face). See attached pic.

Any suggestions on how to remove those translucent white stripes from this picture in GIMP (or any other free tool)?

Also, constructive suggestions on how I could better this picture in otherways or have better captured this picture are welcome!!

Thanks, in advance !!

P.S> Pic taken from Canon Rebel T3i with stock 55-250mm lens

Try using "Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask" and experimenting with the values (start with a Radius of "500", Amount of "0.5", Threshold of "0" and go from there).

What a beautiful animal, that enhance/unsharp mask works very well, and should work. I don't think I would tackle that one, with all his little whiskers and pores etc, I would probably ruin it.

Use the Path tools (or freehand in polygon mode) to make a selection that follow the wires edges, then feather it somewhat (200 px give the photo size). Then just add some contrast (+17 in the sample below). Sample with only the lower wire processed:



On the whole when shooting animals in zoos, you have to look for the smallest depth of field to remove the grids: max zoom and max aperture. Sometime it's better to back off a bit form the grid. The whole grid will be blurred away and just cause a small but general loss of contrast, rather easy to recover. I have pictures where the grid is completely invisible (of course, I shot with a 400mm )

Your camera will shoot very decent pictures at 1600ISO, at that rating the slight chroma noise is more that compensated by the increase in sharpness. Your lens has a decent IS but it will do a better works at 1/60s than at 1/13s...

Another thing about the 55-250: put in front of it a good close-up lens (ideally the Canon 500D one, or a good two dioptries one) and it makes a rather decent macro lens (a true macro lens is easier to use, bit more expensive).

First, in the future, shoot RAW.

The way I would approach is this as follows. I think of this as fundamentally a contrast problem.

So,
Layer -> Duplicate Layer.
On the duplicate layer, adjust brightness/contrast so that the fog goes away.
Next Create a layer mask. Using a soft-brush, paint on the mask so that the bottom layer shows through where you don't want to brightness/contrast to effect the image. Use varying degrees of opacity to your brush and use a large brush such as 500px.

Now we enhance the resulting image.

Edit -> copy visible -> Paste as New.
Layer -> Duplicate Layer -> Desaturate (lightness) -> Gaussian Blur (75 px or thereabout) -> Invert. Adjust opacity to taste

Finally Select lower Layer -> Tools -> Gegl Operation -> Unsharp Mask.

Hope this helps.

Partha

Thanks all for your valuable suggestions.
Detailed steps are always appreciated by a newbie like me. Am relatively new to GIMP and am really excited to see the tools offered by this open-source software.

I will try out these suggestions and post back the results.

I used layer masks to manually adjust some area's saturation, color, brightness, contrast etc. Played with the hue a little too, it seemed like it was too green. I haven't applied any drastic filters because I figured you'd want to preserve the image rather than manipulate it.