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Repairing and improving photos in Photoshop

Damage, like fashion, is often very subjective. If you show the same set of photos to five people and ask them to comment on mistakes or damage, you’ll likely get five very different answers. The reason is that people find different things distracting: A crooked photo may bother some, whereas others may dislike dust on the camera sensor. Several aspects of an image can be “wrong,” but it is also impossible to have a “perfect” photo.

Because damage is so subjective, I recommend asking your clients or end customers (if possible) what needs repair. Ask them questions like, would you like anything different or can anything be better? You’ll often be surprised by their answers. Sometimes a fix will be as simple as a crop or a color correction, but more often it will involve removing something from (or adding to) the picture. The world has embraced digital enhancement, and you may be surprised at how much Photoshop can do.

This article tackles issues like physical damage, such as rips, wrinkles, scratches and fading as well as digital issues such as overblown skies and noise. It focuses on techniques that you can perform in less than 10 minutes. With practice you can fix 80 percent of the problems in 10 minutes; the other 20 percent you either learn to live with or spend more time on.

The retoucher’s toolbox

The process of making a photo look better is often referred to as retouching (while repairing damaged photos is referred to as restoration). Because there are many different problems that can manifest in a photo, Photoshop offers several tools with which to respond. Knowing which tool to use is often a dilemma, but with a little bit of study and practice the process can be greatly accelerated. Let’s explore how the tools work and give them a try.

But first, realize that most of these tools use a paintbrush behavior. Be sure your painting tools are set to Brush size and your other tools to Precise in the Preferences dialog box (Edit > Preferences). This will allow you to better see your tools as you move them in your image.

Clone Stamp tool


The Clone Stamp tool works by replacing unwanted or damaged pixels with good pixels that you target. It’s a popular tool that is relatively easy to use and achieves accurate results.

The Clone Stamp tool allows you to set a sample point (where the good pixels are taken from), and then paint into bad areas (to cover up damage or blemishes). This technique is very powerful, because the Photoshop paint engine can use soft brushes, which can soften the stamp’s edge, making the strokes more believable as they blend together better.

Healing Brush tool


The Healing Brush tool (J) is an innovative and powerful tool that can be used to repair blemishes in a photo. The Healing Brush tool operates much like the Clone Stamp tool. However, instead of just moving pixels from one area to another, the Healing Brush tool clones pixels while also matching the texture, lighting and shading of the original pixels.

Because the Healing Brush samples surrounding areas, you may want to make an initial selection around the damaged area and feather it. This will give you better results on an area with strong contrast. The selection should be slightly bigger than the area that needs to be healed. It should follow the boundary of high-contrast pixels. For example, if you’re healing a blemish on a subject’s face, make an initial selection of the skin area to avoid mixing in the adjacent background or clothing. The selection will prevent color bleed-in from outside areas when painting with the Healing Brush tool.

Spot Healing Brush tool


The Spot Healing Brush tool was added to Photoshop as a way to harness powerful blending technology with less work (although the Healing Brush is pretty labor-free to begin with). It can quickly remove blemishes and imperfections in photos without requiring a sample point to be set. The Spot Healing Brush tool automatically samples pixels from the area around the retouched area. Let’s give the tool a try.

Patch tool


The Patch tool uses the same technology as the Healing Brush tool, but it is better suited to fix large problem areas. Start using the Patch tool by selecting the area for repair and then dragging to specify the sampled area. For best results, select a small area.

Red Eye tool

Red eye is caused when the camera flash is reflected in a subject’s retinas. This happens frequently in photos taken in a dark room, because the subject’s irises are open wide. There are two solutions to fixing red eye in the field:

  • Use the camera’s red eye reduction feature. This will strobe the flash and adjust the eyes of your subject. This strobing will increase the time from when you click the camera’s shutter and the photo is taken.
  • Use a separate flash unit that can be held to the side or increase the distance between the lens and the flash.

Getting it right in the field is important, but you can fix it in Photoshop as well. Photoshop offers a powerful Red Eye tool that can fix flash problems. It effectively removes red eye from flash photos of people and white or green reflections in the eyes of animals.

Content-Aware Fill


The Content-Aware fill option provides the ability to automatically generate new textures to fill a selected area. What happens is that Photoshop randomly synthesizes similar content to fill the area based on the source image. This is a great way to remove an object or blemish from a scene. In some cases it completes the job in one step; in others it offers a great jump start and can be touched up with a little cloning or healing.

Content-Aware Move


With the Content-Aware Move tool, you can select an object, and then drag it into a new position. The original object is extracted, and its background is filled generating a new texture with Content-Aware fill technology; then the repositioned copy is blended into the image. This tool can be quite effective, especially if you adjust the Adaptation property in the Options bar to a stricter setting.

Blur and Sharpen tools

Often, a photo will need a focus adjustment. Although global changes are often implemented through blur or sharpen filters, it’s frequently necessary to lightly touch up an area by hand. To do this, you can use the Blur tool (to defocus) or the Sharpen tool (to add focus or detail). Both tools are driven by brush-like settings, which allow you to change size, hardness, strength, and blending mode. Remember that if the Caps Lock key is down, brush previews are disabled.

Smudge tool


The Smudge tool simulates dragging a finger through wet paint. The pixels are liquid and can be pushed around the screen. With the default settings, the tool uses color from where you first click and pushes it in the direction in which you move the mouse. This tool is useful for cleaning up dust specks or flakes in a photo. Set the tool’s blending mode to Lighten or Darken (depending on the area to be affected), and you’ll have digital makeup to touch up the problem.

Dodge and Burn tools


The Dodge and Burn tools are known as toning tools. They allow you finer control over lightening or darkening your image. These tools simulate traditional techniques used by photographers. In a darkroom, the photographer would regulate the amount of light on a particular area of a print. These tools are particularly helpful when touch- ing up faded photos, especially when repairing water damage. Let’s try out both tools.

Sponge tool

The Sponge tool is very elegant and efficient. This toning tool can be used to make subtle adjustments in color saturation or grayscale contrast. It can also be used during conversion processes to prepare images for commercial printing or television. The Sponge tool allows you to gently desaturate (or saturate) areas by brushing over them.

Lens Correction filter


The Lens Correction filter is designed to fix common flaws in an image (such as barrel distortion, lens vignettes, and chromatic aberration). The filter can be run on 8- or 16-bit-per-channel images that use the RGB or Grayscale image mode. The filter can also correct perspective problems caused by camera tilt.

Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction plug-in


A common flaw caused by wide-angle lens is distortion. If you shoot with a very large field of view (wide-angle rectilinear or full-frame fisheye), the photo will often show a bending of straight lines and other distortion near the edges of the photo. The Adap- tive Wide Angle Correction plug-in can fix perceptible distortion. The plug-in requires only a small amount of input from a user to know which lines should be straight.