Duplicate the image using Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) plus “J”. The first thing we need to do is select the part of the image we want to change. On this particular image that’s fairly simple. Other backgrounds may be more difficult. There are many tutorials out there, and on TipSquirrel.com, that can show you different ways to do this. For this background we’re just going to use the Quick Selection Tool (Photoshop CS5). On your duplicated layer just “paint” in the background to select it. No holding any buttons down or anything (unless you want to paint a part of the selection out, of course, then you hold the Alt or Opt key down…). Easy breezy!

Next we need to mask the area. When the area you want is selected, go to the bottom of the layers panel and chose the Add Vector Mask icon, the gray rectangle with the white circle inside. By default the mask will be white in the selected area and black in the unselected area. You want this to be the reverse; to invert, simple use keyboard shortcut Cmd or Ctrl plus “I” (for Invert).  Make sure you have the mask itself selected when you invert.

Now go back to the original layer. For this next bit you can either use this layer or duplicate it again. I prefer to duplicate it because the next process will change it and I want the original to compare the result. That’s just me. If you’re like me, use keyboard shortcut Ctrl or Cmd “J”, now.

With the layer (orig. or duplicate) selected, go to the bottom of the layers panel and select the Add a New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon (the half white, half black circle), then choose a Hue / Saturation adjustment. In the Hue / Saturation dialog, move the Hue slider around to find the color you want to replace the original. Don’t worry too much about the brightness of the color; concentrate more on a color that looks good with the image.

To calm the brightness down, you can move the Saturation slider a bit to the left. You can also adjust the lightness or darkness of the background with the Lightness slider, if you wish.

Now we need to go back to the original mask and clean things up a bit. Select the brush tool and make sure the foreground color is set to white. The first thing we’ll do is take care of the areas that are now green (or whatever color you changed the background to) and shouldn’t be, the necklace that didn’t get masked out in the first place, for instance. Adjust the brush size to fit the area as you go along using the open and close bracket keys. Zoom in close and go around all the edges of the selected area to make sure that the new color isn’t creeping in where it doesn’t belong.

The next step is to invert the foreground color to black and paint in all the areas where the original background color, in this case that lovely pink, is all painted out.

Now for a word about fringe; you need to pay particular attention to the area around the selection that isn’t super obvious but critical, just the same, to the result of your background change. Nothing screams “Fake!” as much as badly done edges!  Be particularly careful around light edges, in this case the skin. If you get sloppy you’ll get green where you don’t want it. In the dark areas, like the hat or t-shirt, you can be a bit less stringent.  In fact, I want you to go over the edge into the shirt a bit! There’s a color cast from the pink background reflecting on the shirt, so when you see that, go over it with the brush.

To fix that bit of untidiness we just made, we’re going to soften the mask a bit. With the mask selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Move the slider up or down enough to soften the edges without blowing out the areas of the mask around the lighter (skin) areas.

The area where we painted green in the shirt is still very obvious. To make it less so, bring up your color picker by double clicking on the foreground color and choose something around 25% gray.

Paint in those obvious green areas in the shirt with the gray. Soften the edges, if you like, by selecting the blur tool from the tool panel and painting over the area.

Take some time to zoom in and catch all those areas where the wrong color has bled or fringed and you’ll have a background color change no one will ever realize was different at all!

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Here’s a super simple way to add a little depth to an old image just by making certain elements stand out from the rest.

This is a great image taken from my current scanning project. There’s not much wrong with it at all, maybe a tiny speck or spot here and there and the color isn’t really to my taste, but the composition and overall condition are wonderful! Still, it could use a little something to make the mother and baby stand out a little from the background and it one simple step, they can!

All you have to do to accomplish this fairly dramatic transition is to darken the areas behind your main subjects, the mother and child in this case, to make them recede and bring the main subjects out.

After you have your image open in Photoshop, add a Curves Adjustment layer by going to the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the layers panel.

Bring the Curves histogram from the center down towards the lower right hand corner to darker the image.

There are many ways to make the mask, of course, but I just “drew” the mask in. You can mask the background the way you like best!

After your mask is done, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and move the slider to a point where the edges are just slightly softened, to blend the sharp edges.

Now lower the Opacity of the mask. I used the value of 85%. 100% was a little too obvious, but I still needed the darkening to be enough to make a difference.

And that’s all there is to that! Just this one simple step brings out the central subject, causing the background to recede and the foreground to stand out in a very subtle and natural way!

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Lines in images can be a real challenge when it comes to restoration. You can try to subtly blend them away if the lines are thin enough. You can try to select each and every line and change the blend mode if they’re thick enough…okay, let’s get real! I certainly don’t have the time to select tons of lines on an image, do you? I didn’t think so! So what we have, here, is a dilemma of a sort. I had an otherwise simple restoration a few weeks ago, merely compositing a number of images from a family reunion together so the entire family was present and looking in the camera. The proverbial fly in the ointment was that every image had lines going through them.

Since the lines were in all the images, that told me that it was a problem with either the camera, the flash card from the camera, or the flash drive the customer brought the images on. Lines can also result from printing and scanning. Of course, the best thing to do is to retake the image or reprint or rescan with different equipment, but in some cases, like 100^th family reunion pictures, that’s not an option. There’s one good thing about the lines being the result of faulty equipment, though; my job would have been even harder if just one of the images had lines. At least the surface to be repaired was consistent!

The simplest thing to do, maybe even one of the only things, is to go to Filter > Other > Maximum. Keep the pixel radius low, as low as possible in fact. I’ve never gone above 1; bad things happened when I did. Try it, and see for yourself! Now all there is to do is hit Enter! How simple was that? The Maximum filter increases the lighter portions of the image, decreasing the darker areas, so if you have fairly thin, darker lines, this fix could be perfect.

The only drawback that I can see, other than the image being a little softer, less sharp, than it was is that some images, especially those with thicker lines, tend to have a moiré pattern appear after the filter is applied. It’s for you to decide if the result is worse than the lines!

Let’s try the Maximum filter on another image, this one with thinner, slightly lighter lines.

Again, we’ll go to Filter > Other > Maximum, and keep it to a pixel radius of one.

This is the sort of image, those with thinner, lines, where the Maximum filter really shines! It’s still a little soft, and, as all images you use the Max filter on will be, lighter. To get some of the sharpness back, you can duplicate the image (Image > Duplicate) and go to Image > Adjustments > HDR Toning. When it asks if you want to flatten the image, say yes – that’s why we made a duplicate! Scroll through the presets to find the best starting point; I find Photorealistic usually works great. Now start moving the sliders, especially the Detail slider, but also Highlights, Shadows; Vibrance and Saturation if it’s a color image, even Radius and Strength if done very sparingly. Click OK when done to your satisfaction.

Now use the move tool to move the HDR copy to the tab of the original image, holding down the Shift key to center on top of the image. Change the Layer Blend Mode to Soft Light and lower the Opacity to 75%. If you don’t mind the softness of the image, just use a Curves Adjustment (black eyedropper in a dark area, only) to darken the image up a bit.

If lines in your images are bugging you, give the Maximum filter a try; at the very least it’s better than selecting all those lines!

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Let’s look at this image for instance. Granted, it doesn’t have a terrible color cast, more of a slightly yellow haze, but it’s definitely not all it could be. Color Balance lets you adjust the primary colors, the additive primaries, red, green and blue, and the subtractive primaries, those made by combining the primaries: red + green =yellow; green + blue= cyan and red + blue=magenta. Color Balance is a little like a non-destructive version of Variations, with the extra added benefit of you being totally in control!

Also, like Variations, you can work on the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights independently of each other, but with a much better all-around result.  You can adjust the tones in whatever order you like, just keep in mind that if you switch to another image and come back, for whatever reason, the program switches back to the default, Midtones. It’s a good idea just to keep an eye on that setting.

All you do with Color Balance is move the sliders to the left and right and discern which adjustments look better to you. That’s it! You can go back and do more whenever you like, unless you access the Color Balance panel through Image > Adjustments > Color Balance, or Ctrl/Cmd +B. In that case you need to make a duplicate layer specifically for the adjustment as it’s destructive and works on the image itself, and you can’t go back and readjust later.

­­Talk about a simple adjustment! What could be easier? But there’s something else that can make it even better, a good old Curves Adjustment! Here’s another image with a slightly green cast.

Make the visual adjustments as before:

Then add a Curves Adjustment, using the black and white eyedroppers on the darkest and lightest points. If it’s too bright, bring the opacity of the Curves layer down to between 50 and 75%. This image now looks like it was taken today!

Now we know it works great on light color casts, but what about heavier casts? This image has a heavy red/yellow cast. Let’s see what Color Balance can do for it.

First, go through all the tonal adjustments. A heavy cast may take a step or two more, so don’t worry if it’s not perfect. Just go for a decent visual adjustment.

Now add a Curves Adjustment, using the black and white droppers on the darkest and lightest points.

If it’s too bright, which this is, and here’s the beauty of adjustment layers, go back and tweak the Color Balance adjustments!

Yet another color correction tool to try, Color Balance is sure to be a keeper in your digital restoration took kit!

Below find a small before/after gallery of images lightened, brightened and corrected using Color Balance:

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This is the perfect type of photograph to use for this technique. It’s available for you to download but is a part of a private family archive and is to be used for the purposes of this tutorial only! I’d love to see what you do with the technique, but please send it to me privately and don’t post to the internet, unless you use your own image, of course!

Here’s the image after a little basic restoration work. The work was done with the Content Aware Fill feature in Photoshop CS5. Since the work was done before I lessened the texture a bit, other tools just could tend to make a mess, so work in small areas with the patch tool, and with small brush sizes if you use the healing brushes…or you can smooth the texture first to make the whole process easier!

We just want to soften the texture slightly, so go to Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur, and keep the Radius down to a relatively low Pixel value. I used a radius of 0.8 pixels on a resolution of 200 pixels per inch.

I wanted to bring a little of the clarity back after the softening, so my next step was to duplicate the image (Image> Duplicate) and flatten it (Right Click over the layer panel, than all the way to the bottom, Flatten Image). Go to the Image menu, Adjustments, then HDR Toning. I went with the Photorealistic preset, but brought the Detail slider up just a bit more.

Click ok. Select the Move Tool from the tool panel and click on the duplicate image, dragging and dropping it into the original image. Holding down the shift key while you’re doing this will place it in the center of the previous image.  Change the Layer Blend Mode of the HDR image to Soft Light, and bring the opacity down to around 40%. This step also deepens the contrast a bit.

This old style glamour look is noted for its dramatic lighting contrasts, so we want to play that up. We’ll start by darkening the background a little. Add an New Filter Adjustment Layer and select Curves.

Bring the center of the histogram down towards the bottom right hand corner to darken. Click okay. With black as the foreground color, paint in the foreground (the person). Leave the areas you want to darken white. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and blur the mask edges, slightly to blend. Lower the opacity of the mask layer to 45 or 50%.

Add another Curves adjustment Layer, this time using the white eyedropper to select in a lighter area of the image. The object here is to make the image a little brighter, over all, not particularly lighter. Notice where the histogram is after the adjustment; you can also manually bring the histogram to somewhere around this point, if the eyedropper makes it too light. Bring the opacity of the layer down to around 40%.

Make a new, blank layer and change the Layer Blend Mode to Soft Light. With the foreground color set to white, adjust the brush tool to fit inside the eye and paint in the iris. Blur the are slightly with either the Blur Tool or by going to Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur and selecting a low setting. Lower the opacity to around 75%

Add another new, blank layer, change the blend mode to Soft Light and, with black as the foreground color, and paint in the areas of the eyes you want to darken. Soften with the blur tool or Gaussian Blur, and lower the opacity to around 40%

Continue to add new Soft Light Blend Mode layers to lighten and darken other areas. Lighten the teeth and the whites of the eyes, darken the lips, lighten the highlights in the hair, add highlights to the cheekbones, etc. Follow the natural plays of light and shadow in the image. You can add more of these Soft Light layers anytime.

To give the skin a little more softness, use Shift + Ctrl + Alt + E or Shift + Cmd + Opt + E to combine all the layers into their own layer. Go to Filter > Blur + Gaussian Blur. Blur enough to smooth everything out, but still retain definition of the eyes, etc. You don’t want to over blur.

Add a layer mask to the combined blur layer and invert the mask to black. Make sure the foreground color is white and paint in the skin areas. Lower the opacity to around 40%. You can also soften the hair with a Gaussian Blur, but I prefer to do that on a separate layer so I can add a little more or a little less blur by adjusting the opacity percentage.

By adjusting the contrast and softness you can add the drama and glamour of 1940’s Hollywood to an ordinary black and white portrait!

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Begin by duplicating the layer, Ctrl + J (on a PC) or Cmd + J (on a Mac). For those who may not know, this is a good practice for digital restoration so you can compare the before image to your after work.

I used to run around like a chicken with my head cut off looking for images with obliterated eyes to practice flipping off…I mean flipping eyes, but then it hit me, duh! The eyes don’t have to be destroyed to practice, ditz! In fact, when practicing, especially when just starting down the flipping road, having both eyes intact can be very helpful! The sample photo, one in my personal collection, is available for download to follow along. Naturally, it’s for your personal, educational use only, and not to be used for any other reason, except if you’d like to send it along to show us just how awesome you’re getting at this!

There’s more than one way to skin a cat…or flip an eye. There’s cloning and flipping, there’s cutting and flipping, there’s piecing and flipping…well, you get the picture. Usually, the best way to go about the most natural horizontal eye flips is a combination of two of these, which are basically the same things; only the way you go about them is different.

The Clone Flip

This procedure was covered very well in a video by our own TipSquirrel. If the process confuses you at all or you’re new to flipping from the Clone Source panel, I highly recommend watching it.

This is a wonderful way to flip and clone, especially, like everything else, when you’ve used it enough to be comfortable with all the settings and such. If you clone the entire eye, it’s the same as the cut and flip, which we’ll go over in a moment, except you’re “painting” it in instead of selecting and cutting; personal preference, really, but the same result. If you’re cloning in a portion of the eye, as Tipsy has in the video, it works best when you have the subject of the image looking fairly straight into the camera and there’s not a lot of discrepancy between the eyes, such as those pesky saggy eyelids or something.

The Cut ‘N’ Flip

This is my personal favorite no no other reason than I’ve gotten it into my head that it just takes less time to select an area, Ctrl (or Cmd, if you’re so inclined) +J, Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal, Move Tool, Arrow key…probably just because I’ve been doing it forever. As for the how of it, I pretty much just said it all, but here’s a quick do-over:

Select…

Flip (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal)…

Move…

…and all’s done but the tweaking. Speaking of tweaking…

Tweakin’ Flips

I’ve seen tutorials (many, many tutorials…) that sort of lead you to believe that once you flip and move you’re done. Sure, you could, but only if you want little children to laugh and point at your work. The flip needs to be adjusted, tweaked if you will, to make it look normal. First, a little trick to help your tweaking.

This is where having two good eyes, or at least most of an eye, to practice on comes in handy. On a new, blank layer, mark around the eye you’re replacing. This can either be a line all around, dots, or a series of lines marking the edges, that’s up to you.

Move that layer to the top, over the flipped eye layer. Move your eye flip over and Edit > Free Transform. Now move and rotate the flipped eye to match with the marked up layer.

You can also, of course, right click over the transform area and select Warp if you need to do a little more transformation to make the flipped eye fit just right. After you’ve adjusted to your heart’s content, either turn the marked up layer’s visibility off, or delete it.

You may need to adjust the lightness or darkness of the flipped eye. Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels and move the sliders to get the “new” eye as close in tone to the one you’re replacing as possible.

Now you just need to add a layer mask to the flipped eye layer, or use the eraser tool at around 20% Opacity to blend the new eye in.

Ok, now it’s all selected, or cloned, flipped, moved and blended, but something’s still not right…

Flipping Pieces

What’s wrong with this picture?

When we flipped the eye, the eye lights also got flipped, and now they’re in the wrong place. This is a perfect opportunity for a spot fix! Just like an image that only has, for instance, a rip or a scratch going through the middle of the eye, it would be silly to fix the whole eye!

You can spot fix either by…cut and flip…

Or by cloning (and not flipping) that one area (in this case, the pupil of the eye) on to a new, blank layer.

Practice these flipping ways and try combinations to make everything work right, and pretty soon, you’ll be flipping wonderful!

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[Authors note: The image used in this article is not the image referred to in the story, but another where the face is nearly, though not completely, obliterated.]

A potential client called me this past week and asked if I might be able to help her. You see, she’d thought to clean an old photograph of her great grandparents and ended up “cleaning” the faces right off her ancestors with window cleaner and a cotton swab. If there was anything, even a faint hit of the facial features left, I might be able to do something, but if not then unfortunately, unless she happens to have another photograph of the people in the image that I can use as reference, this is one type of damage even I can’t fix.

When it comes to the faces of loved ones in old images, you really can’t make something out of nothing. But what, some of you might ask, about drawing or compositing?

To Draw or Not to Draw…

The aforementioned potential client actually wanted me to draw the faces back in and was fairly insistent that I do so. “I’ll tell you what” I told her, “drawing a face, or any other missing piece of a photograph is almost never a good idea”. I say almost because there may be one exception; if you are a complete master, and by master I mean master of photorealistic drawing like Bert Monroy or Linda Huber , you might, just might get away with it. Anything less and it will look like what it is, a drawing in a photograph. Let me be frank about this; it will look bad.

Compositing; it’s Not Just for Breakfast, Anymore…

Compositing might be a better option provided, again, that you are very, very good at it. Compositing like digital photo restoration and drawing is an art. It takes skill and talent to put a new piece into a photograph and make it look like it was always there. It’s something that should be done sparingly and with responsibility, and if you can’t do it well you have no business doing it (for clients) at all! I’ve seen enough floating heads, contortionist’s limbs and paper doll cutouts on new backgrounds to last a lifetime and more thank you very much, but that begs another question: Even if you can do it well, does that mean you always should?

Perhaps, if we’re talking bits that aren’t readily identifiable like a foot or an arm it’s acceptable if, big IF, you have exceptional compositing skills (I know I keep saying that, but I’m just throwing it out hoping some of it will stick, you understand…)! It’s also fine if you have other photos of the subject from which to borrow the composite materials from, providing you don’t just stick a face onto the other image without any thought to shadows, distortion, orientation and a whole host of other factors. If the photo is of close kin, identifiable to the viewer (as opposed to nameless unrelated faces in a mass sitting, a group photo like a class picture, for example), you should never use random faces for your composite no matter how good you are. Why? Well in a nutshell, “that ain’t my grandma!”

It’s never a good idea to composite a face just for the sake of compositing a face on someone’s ancestor. If you do, it’s not going to be their ancestor any longer. No matter how pretty, how well done or how awesome the image is when you’re done, the object of fixing a photograph of someone is so that if someone who knew that person could look at the photo and say “That’s so-and-so” or at least “That looks like so-and-so”. How will that even have a chance to happen if you paste Brad Pitts face on Gramps?

There are ways you can get away with a bit of compositing here and there, though, if you’re very careful and just composite pieces, an eye here, a part of a nose, there, that match the general shape of the missing piece. You’ll need the use of tools like Transform and Warp to move bits around to match direction, size and shape as close as possible. You can also use bits taken from descendants who are known to resemble the ancestor in question. These are very advanced options, though, and shouldn’t be undertaken by the fainthearted!

Working With What’s Left…

If there’s anything left in the image, anything at all, you may be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and save the day…or not. I don’t want to raise any false hopes, but it’s always at least worth a try. The first thing you need to do it evaluate. With the image open in Photoshop (I’ve never attempted any of the really tough stuff in anything but PS, so I can’t say if any other program would do as well, so won’t recommend any.), zoom in on the area with the “lost” information. Try the normal methods of bringing out information, Curves, Levels, Channels, etc., to see what information is left; not to keep, necessarily, but for evaluation purposes. In the image below I found a little more of the basic outline of areas in the Blue Channel, enough to get an outline of the eyes and the area of the nostrils. The mouth is faint, but visible.

I drew a crude outline around the eyes and marked the nostrils on a new, blank layer, to give me a rough idea of the position of things.

Now, zooming in very close, I begin to repair the existing pixels, filling in areas such as the pupils, as I go along.

Instead of line drawing in things like a nose I make use of Curves to use darks and lights to “draw” in features. A line of lighter tones down the dorsum, or bridge, of the nose, the lower lip and places that protrude out in a face, will bring them out. Darker tones go in places that either recede or are in the shadow of the distending areas, such as the ala (the flared out area over the nostril) or the philtrum, the area between the center of the upper lip and the nose. This is sort of painting with light, only not in a cheesy Thomas Kinkade-y kind of way…

Keep refining the light and dark, using multiple Curves levels. A couple of tips for these layers:

• Invert the Curves mask so you’re painting with the light or dark tone, not filling the entire image
• Always use Gaussian blur to blur the mask slightly for a better blend
• Lower the opacity of the Curves Adjustment layer so the result is subtle and build on it with additional adjustment layers. This makes for a much better result than one really light or dark adjustment

Remember to check occasionally with the layer where you sketched in the general outline you could see.

The finished result may not be a pretty as say, a good composite of a different face, and it’s far from “perfect”, but at least it’s made up of, basically, pieces of the original face, in the places those pieces should be!

Remember, these are projects for the very advanced, especially when dealing with customers, but restorationists of all levels should try it, and keep trying! Look for people you trust to critique you honestly, not just tell you how good it is to spare your feelings. Doing this sort of repair is a great way to grow your skills!

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The adage “it’s better to be safe than sorry” is a good one to keep in mind. Of course, you may not have the luxury of taking the images yourself. Let’s say, just for arguments sake, that after years of begging and pleading, you finally get the image of your great-great grandparents from the cousin who’s been promising to send it, forever, and the image is less than perfect. The image is in bubble glass, the lighting made for a lovely color-cast and there’s only one shot, from straight on, which made for some fairly wicked distortion. The odds of ever getting shots from other angles is slim-to-none, since this one was years in coming, so what do you do now?

The color cast problem can be dealt with in the usual way, but what about the distortion?  First, take a minute to see what direction the distortion is going in. Look at the example above, see how it sort of fans out and back at the top and out to the sides?  I guess that would be the obvious direction, since it’s bubble glass, but flat glass can be distorted like this, too, depending on a number of factors, such as where you’re standing in relation to the picture and the lens on your camera.

So, now that you have that distortion direction in mind, duplicate your original layer (you have to keep your ‘before’ reference copy, after all, you know!) by one of three methods: right click on the layer itself and choose Duplicate, go to the Image menu and choose Duplicate or use keyboard shortcut Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) + J, and then transform (Ctrl or Cmd + T) Now right click the image and choose Distort. Since the distortion of the image fanned out at the top, bring the top handles of the Distort Transform slightly out to the sides. This may seem counter-intuitive, but what it’s actually doing is bringing the image back towards the viewer where it was distorting back away from the viewer due to the bubble of the glass. Also bring the bottom handles in, slightly, towards the center to line everything up a little better.

Next, since the glass bubbles out, we’re going to bring it back in, some. While still in Transform mode, right click on the image, again, and select Warp. Bring the center of each side in a bit to make what was convex more concave.

If your people are looking a bit on the skinny side after all that, right click again while still in Transform, and select Free Transform. Pull the side handles out a bit until the image looks right.

Lens Correction Filter

I can hear many of you, now, asking why I just don’t go to Filter > Lens Correction to fix the distortion?  The answer is…you can!  Especially if you’re not a control freak like someone we know who may be writing this article…If you do, just keep the same bits in mind, that is, geometric distortion (concave) and vertical perspective (bringing the top handles of the distortion transform out and the bottom handles in).

So whether you correct lens distortion on your own by eye, or you let Photoshop’s Lens Correction feature help you out, it’s easier than you think to bring an image back into perspective!

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My friend uses Elements and, I admit, I went to the webs to try and find an Elements tutorial to send her but to my surprise, I couldn’t find a thing I could use! So off the Elements I went. This is a super simple, easy peasy tutorial. You couldn’t make this hard if you tried, so grab your favorite font and play along!

Open a new document (File > New > Blank File or Ctrl (PC) CMD (Mac)+ N) and choose a size, any will do.

Choose your Text Tool, pick a font and type a word. The word I’ve typed is the name of the type (there’s a great array of free fonts available at places such as DaFont.com)

Next, go to Effects and choose Bevel from the drop down menu. Try them all to see which you like for your project; simply choose one and then hit Apply. If you don’t like it, choose another and hit Apply again.

Now, go back to the drop down menu and choose Wow Chrome. Select the first style, Beveled Edge. This is your basic for silver.

To make it a little more silver and a bit less chrome, make a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer…

…and check the Colorize box. Slide the Hue over to the blues and lower the Saturation level.

For the gold tone, you’ll also go to the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer and tick the Colorize box, this time bringing the Hue into the yellow range. Adjust the Saturation to the tone you like.

That’s all there is to it!  A very simple, basic way to make a classy siver, gold, or even chrome text!

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When the glare has a starburst, such as in this example, start your repair by getting rid of the spikes of light, leaving only the ball of light in the middle. I did this using the Content Aware Spot Healing Brush.

When the spikes are gone, there’s a nice, clear area to select for the next part of the repair. Select as large an area as you can…

And move the selection down over the glare area. If the selection doesn’t entirely cover the glare, use the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (PC) command and stretch the selection to fit.

On the edges that aren’t directly over the glare, you can lower the opacity of the eraser tool to 20% and go lightly over the edges to blend, as I did here on the sides of the selection and to erase and blend any overlapping areas, such as the mans hair in the photo above.

On the edges that are over the glare, you’ll need to combine the selection and the photograph itself. With the selection layer active, use the Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) commend to combine that layer with the one below it. Select the edges of the (former) selection layer and move the selection up to the area above to blend.

Repeat with any other obvious edges.

Now, for the eyeglass glare! Select the glare with either the Lasso tool or Patch tool. Go to Edit > Fill or use keyboard shortcut Shift + F5. Make sure the use option is set to Content Aware and hit OK. Repeat on all the rest of the glare, if applicable.

We’ll get rid of the edges that are around the edges of the Content Aware repairs the same way we did above, by using the Patch tool. Select the obvious edges and use the areas right around to blend the edges.

Repeat patching all the edges to blend them in.

Now the starburst is gone and the lens glare has changed to non-glare lenses. These are just a couple ways to deal with glare in a photograph, but may be worth giving a try!

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