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NZ Macguide Issue 4

Photoshop has been used for years to restore images, but with two of its most exciting new tools, the Healing Brush Tool and the Patch Tool, its more capable than ever. We found a challenging image to run Photoshop 7 through its paces, scanning it to 300% at 300dpi.

The prognosis
A family picture taken in 1947 - it's been in the bottom of a drawer for decades and shows all the signs of a hard life: stains, yellowing, fading, tears, folding, fingerprints - and besides all that, it's tiny at only six centimetres high.

Once scanned, the first step is decide whether to keep the image colour, with a kind of sepia look, or whether to make it black and white.

To change the mode, you can choose Image>Mode and select Greyscale, which discards all colours and arbitrarily flattens the image to shades of grey.

To manage the shift to grey yourself, select Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer and check the Monochrome option.

Channel Mixer lets you directly assign which colour attribute shifts to which shade of grey, giving you far more control. Here's an example used on an image converted to the CMYK colour space; these settings have allowed me to get more contrast and more definition in dark items like the battle dress jacket.

Off colour
However, I'm choosing to leave my scan as RGB (colour defined by red, green and blue and how they mix). Ill restore it, but it will have a sepia tone.

Previously, before Photoshop 7 came along, I'd painstakingly work over the image with a small brush using the stamp tool. The beauty of 7 is that the Healing Brush almost miraculously preserves textures, remapping the pixels you've moved to take on the characteristics of those beneath, so that reconstruction can take place using a little less care and bigger brushes in areas like walls or vegetation.

First I'll straighten the picture up perfectly using my all time favourite Photoshop trick (it works in 5 and 6, too): select the Measure tool from the menu that pops out when you click and hold on the eyedropper palette. Click and drag along the axis which is not four-square with the measure tool, thenU choose Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary... from the Image menu. The angle calculated by the Measure tool has been automatically input into the angle field: click OK and the image jumps to square.

Heal me
OK, the image is straight. Now the hard work begins, so Save As with a new name and you'll have the original as a fallback if anything goes horribly wrong. The Healing Tool is a sophisticated version of the Stamp cloning tool and you use it in a similar way. Choose a suitable brush type and size - a slightly soft edged, small works best (you may find it preferable, as I do, to have selected Brush Size in Preferences>Display and Cursors).

Holding down the Option key, select a point which will give you a good surface match to an area you wish to fix. You'll notice the cursor changes shape to let you know you have the Option key held down for sampling. Click with the mouse, release the option key and cautiously paint over the scratch.

I learnt to retouch real photographs with a tiny brush and ink from expert Egil Moen; the techniques remain the same in Photoshop. Use a combination of short strokes and dabs - never long, involved strokes.

Just after you let go of a stroke or dab, you'll see the brilliance of the Healing Tool work as the pixels rearrange themselves to become textured and take on other suitable attributes.