Heal and patch damaged photos

Excerpted from “Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One” by Deke McClelland.

The edit tools in Adobe® Photoshop® are well suited to a wide variety of retouching scenarios. But they can’t create detail where none exists. To fix dust and scratches or cover up blemishes and wrinkles, you need tools that can paint imagery on top of imagery. Tools like the healing brush and patch tool:

• The healing brush paints one section of an image onto another. As the tool clones the source detail, it mixes it with the color and lighting that surrounds the brushstroke, thereby mending the offending detail seamlessly.

• The patch tool clones like the healing brush. But instead of painting with the tool, you select areas as you would with the lasso.

The following exercise shows you how to use these powerful tools to fix a variety of photographic woes, ranging from rips and tears to blemishes and age spots.

1. Open a broken image.

The photo I used appears so tragically scratched because I scratched it. I printed the image (available in perfect condition from PhotoSpin’s Ed Simpson International People collection) to a continuous-tone Olympus P-400 image printer. Then I folded the output once vertically and again horizontally, scored the crease with a pair of scissors, pressed it flat, and scanned it into Photoshop.

2. Click the healing brush in the toolbox.

True to its mission, the healing brush looks like a band-aid. In the options bar, make sure Source is set to Sampled and the Aligned check box is off. Sampled tells Photoshop to clone pixels from a spot inside an image (as you’ll specify in the next step); turning Aligned off lets you clone several times in a row from one pristine spot.

3. Set the source point for the healing.

The healing brush uses a source point to clone from one portion of an image to another. To set the source point, press the Alt key (Option on the Mac) and click on an unblemished area of your image. The source point I used is indicated by the crosshairs below.

4. Start the healing.

Increase the brush diameter a couple of notches (say, to 30 pixels) and drag over a flaw in your image. I chose the giant mole up and to the left of my source point. As you drag, Photoshop shows you what the patch looks like if you were merely to clone the source detail, as illustrated by the first image below. But the moment you release the mouse button, Photoshop blends the source detail and destination perimeter to create a seamless mend, as witnessed by second image.

5. Heal a scratch.

To heal the scratch across my image, I first pressed [ to reduce the brush diameter to 20 pixels. I then did the following:

• Dragged over the top-right fragment of the left-hand scratch, indicated by the yellow brushstroke in the image below. (Note that the brushstroke colors in this figure are for illustration purposes only; your brushstrokes will appear normal.)

  

• Pressed [ again to reduce the brush diameter to 10 pixels and drag along the bottom fragment, as indicated in cyan in the figure.

• In a separate brushstroke, I dragged along the remaining portion of the left-hand scratch, indicated in purple.

• Finally, I dragged around the area indicated in green. The resulting image is shown below.

  

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