Cleaning up unnatural bokeh from fences

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In the attachments is one of the various photos I have taken where I had a fence in the way or a fence behind the animal or other such things causing a fuss. My current technique is to basically select the foreground then inverse the selection and add a blur to the background to just move things enough that it distorts the appearance of straight lines in the bokeh.

I would love if there was some better techniques for this, so am putting this out there to see if anyone has some suggestions.
 

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SteveC

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I went to a zoo the other day, and of course many of my shots were through fences. In some cases I was zoomed in and my entire field of view was within one diamond shape (it was a sort of woven chain link fence), so no issues...on others, well I won't be publishing the pictures--they're for me--and it doesn't matter that much.

I did switch lenses halfway through the trip and the difference in image quality was very striking...one lens was the Tamron 18-200 and the other the Canon 100-400 II L.

As the Tamron had clearly superior IQ, I'll be selling off the 100-400.

(Just kidding!!! The 100-400 was vastly superior. Though at times I had to back far, far away from my subject to fit it in at 100mm. Perhaps a 70-200 would be better for zoo trips, except for the occasional "through a fence diamond" shot)
 
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AlanF

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In the attachments is one of the various photos I have taken where I had a fence in the way or a fence behind the animal or other such things causing a fuss. My current technique is to basically select the foreground then inverse the selection and add a blur to the background to just move things enough that it distorts the appearance of straight lines in the bokeh.

I would love if there was some better techniques for this, so am putting this out there to see if anyone has some suggestions.
Pity it removed the fox's tail as well.
 
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AlanF

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I have a few with her tail. I thought it was Ginger at first so was trying to avoid the tail as hers is missing. Roxy has a full tail. I’ll try the technique in the video and see if it will fix up the bits I dislike.
You could Photoshop a tail onto her. Once you start with PS, go the whole hog.
 
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You could Photoshop a tail onto her. Once you start with PS, go the whole hog.
I don't think I would want to spend all day photoshopping a tail onto a fox when all I am trying to do is find ways to improve the background bokeh in some of my pictures. As is, this hasn't been given more than a bit of sharpening and levels adjustment.
 
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The video posed by Photorex was indeed interesting but that has a visible fence, the images I have these issues on are at f/2.8 on a 300mm so any fence that I count reach over just becomes part of the bokeh, however it does leave these unwanted streaks. I would be delighted to know if there any any other techniques people have tried, invariably there will be times when something is in my way.
 
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Joules

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I wouldn’t replace the whole background. I can clean it up with a mask and a blur as is which looks much more natural, though I was really hoping there might be better alternatives.
I haven't tried anything a long those lines yet, but here's what I have been thinking about:

Using the fourier transform, one can make edits to an image in the frequency domain. This is a common way to remove 'noise' from images, where noise often refers to undesirable patterns, rather than just the random grain that we usually think of.

As fences are just a kind of pattern, and often have a very regular structure, I'm thinking they should show up in the frequency domain rather well, and it should be possible to deal with them there. But like I said, haven't tried it yet.

Here's an example of an application:

 
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