I know. It seems really cheap to just put a sticker where there should be an inlay but Art & Lutherie obviously took advantage of that when they designed the rosette so I figured, why not go all out and use stickers on the fretboard as well?
I found this website offering a variety of guitar inlay stickers:
While the site shows pictures of the stickers on actual instruments, I wanted to see how they would look on *my* guitar. I also wanted to see how different combinations of fretboard inlays and rosettes would look. This calls for Photoshop!
Rosette removal:
Removing the rosette required taking some of the nearby pixels and cutting/pasting them over top of the rosette. I then used the healing brush to cover up any abrupt changes.
Pickguard removal:
The pickguard covers a significantly bigger area than the rosette, so nearby patches of the wood grain would be insufficient to cover the pickguard. Fortunately, acoustic guitar tops are 'book matched': a sheet of wood is split through the middle and opened like a book. This results in a generally symmetrical wood grain. Therefore, the wood grain underneath the pickguard (high E side) is roughly a mirror image of the low E side of the guitar. So I selected the pixels on the low E side of the guitar, flipped them horizontally, and pasted them over the pickguard (again, healing brush to clean it up).
Here's the before and after photoshop:
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The image below shows what my guitar probably looked like in the factory, before they installed the rosette and pickguard |
Next post...adding the new inlays and rosette digitally...