| Restoring images with Photoshop 7 |
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| Written by Mark Webster | ||||||||||
| Monday, 01 July 2002 | ||||||||||
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The Healing Tool is specifically for textured areas and you'll find the straight Stamp Tool better for fixing small, flat-toned areas (the Healing Tool tends to lighten or darken flat areas). Use Stamp the same way as described above, with Option key sampling. Using a small brush with the Stamp and zooming right in is also definitely preferable to the healing brush for working on faces unless they are really big in the image. Another excellent new tool is Patch. This boggles my mind a little, I have to admit. Patch is much better than the Stamp for fixing large areas whenever there are similar large areas to draw from. To use Patch, select a damaged area then move it to the good area you have chose. Almost miraculously, the damaged bit becomes perfect. This is excellent for shots with blemishes in larger tracts of sky or other large, flattish areas.
The cure In area 1 I'll use the healing brush; in area 2, the Stamp clone tool is better. If you're unsure about an area you've just done, zoom out and see how it looks in relation to everything else. Use the history palette to back-track if things arent going your way, and save whenever you feel you've achieved something. Move section by section - holding down the space bar gives you a grabber hand to make this easy - cover the whole image until you are happy and all the blemishes are gone. Remember you often dont need to paint out straight scratch-lines; basically you can disrupt them with short strokes, especially when the lines run across textures. In my example, I'm not going to remove every tiny blemish either, as part of the charm of the image is its obvious age - in other words, I dont intend to make Gerald, Doreen and Victor Wright look like actors posing today in period dress. You can get pretty quick pretty quickly, changing brushes on the fly by Control-clicking on the image and swapping tools with keyboard strokes (strike s for Stamp and j for Healing Tool, and j again to toggle it with the Patch Tool). when you see professionals at work, its these little touches that make them look blindingly quick. OK, after a bit of a struggle with the bleached-out brick wall on the right (solution: Healing Tool in combination with the Stamp using various levels of opacity, then some selective gentle blurring with the Blur Tool finished with a little shade accentuation with soft passes of a big brush using the Burn Tool) I decided to stop and finish the image.
Press OK and do any final tweaks with gentle tweaks of an s-curve in the Curves dialogue (Image>Adjustments>Curves). Now I need an Unsharp Mask - this Sharpen filter gives the most control and causes the least image degradation when used with care; still, zoom in and check over the image with a small Stamp brush to rectify any minor problems you may have created.
© Parkside Media 2002 Related Articles
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 07 January 2007 ) | ||||||||||
Rest and recreation
Be careful with sharpening; it works by changing the contrast of adjacent pixels so almost invisible blemishes will leap into prominence. These settings are pretty safe: its better to give two gentle Unsharp Masks in succession than to crank the Amount right up. Radius controls how wide the contrast between pixels expands, and Threshold helps prevent sharpening from generating noise in flat areas.
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