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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For this month’s tutorial I thought I’d put together a short video showing you a couple of quick and easy techniques that I regularly use to both Brighten and Colour eyes.

As always if you have any questions about what’s covered in this or any other of my tutorials here on TipSquirrel, feel free to post a comment below or drop me an email to glyn@glyndewis.com Enjoy

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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:

1. Open a file with a blemish (or download our sample image)

Look closely at the image; you’ll see some acne on the child’s forehead and a wet spot on her shirt. Both are easy fixes with the Spot Healing Brush tool.
2. Activate the Spot Healing Brush tool from the Tools panel.

3. Choose a soft-edged brush from the Options bar. Make the brush only slightly larger than the problem areas. For this image, a brush size of 25 pixels and a hardness of 25% will work well.

4. Set the blending mode in the Options bar to Replace to preserve noise, grain, and hair texture at the edges of the stroke.

5. Choose a Type of repair in the Options bar:

• Proximity Match. Pixels from the edge of the selection are used as a patch for the selected area. This should be the first attempt at repair; if it doesn’t look good, switch to the Create Texture option.

• Create Texture. Pixels in the selection are used to create a texture to fix the damaged area. If the texture doesn’t work, try dragging through the area one more time.

6. Click once on an area you want to fix. You can also click and drag over a larger area. After fixing the acne, touch up the wet spot on the child’s shirt. If you are unhappy with the spot healing stroke, simply undo and try again with a smaller brush. You can also try stroking in different directions to modify your results.

Upon close examination, you should notice that you have healed several blemishes in the photo. If only life were so easy.

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The Dust & Scratches filter provides a more powerful way to remove noise from an image. Dissimilar pixels are modified to achieve a balance between sharpening and hiding defects. You’ll want to try different settings on your image because a wide variety of results are possible. It may be helpful to run the filter on only part of your image at a time.

To use the filter, follow these steps:

1. Make a selection or use the entire image. It is a good idea to feather your edges (Select > Modify > Feather) to avoid a visible line when using the filter.

2. Choose Filter > Noise > Dust & Scratches.

3. It is best to keep the preview zoomed in to 100% and pan to see the scratches.

4. Set the Threshold slider to 0. This turns off the value, so that all pixels can be examined. Threshold is used to determine how different pixels must be before they are removed.

5. Move the Radius slider left or right, or choose a value from 1 to 16 pixels. The Radius determines how far to search for differences among pixels. Overuse of Radius blurs the image; you’ll need to balance how much noise is removed versus when softening occurs.

6. Gradually increase the Threshold to the highest value that still produces the desired effect.

7. Click OK when satisfied.

You may have a few small blemishes left to touch up by hand (but much less work than you started with).

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We can use the eyes to focus attention onto what we want the viewer to look at, by emphasising the eyes we encourage the focal point. In this tutorial we will be adding shadows and changing the colour of the eyes, to give it a more fantasy / mystical feel.  Photo from Stock.xchng

Step 1

In this example we are manipulating a woman’s face, we shall start by duplicating the Background Layer by Pressing Control & J or dragging it to the New Layer Icon in the Layer Palette. Name this Layer Eye.

Step 2

We now want to use the Burn Tool to darken the areas around the eye. Set the Range to Midtones and the exposure to 10%, make sure the Brush has a soft edge or your burns will not blend. Begin to gently darken under and around the eyes, take your time to get it looking right. If you are zoomed in – occasionally Zoom out to see the overall effect.

Step 3

The eye colour is the next item on our list, we add a Black and White Adjustment Layer above the Eye Layer. Select the Adjustment Layers Mask and press Control & I on the keyboard together to invert the mask. The eye will now appear as it did before – zoom in on the iris and using a soft edged brush paint with white onto the Mask to reveal the Black and White, making the Iris colourless.

Step 4

Next we add a Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer above the Black and White Adjustment Layer, firstly Click the Colourize tick box to add a tick next set Hue to 0; Saturation to 32 and Lightness to 43. The face will now be red, once again like in Step 3, invert the mask and paint in the iris.

Step 5

We now want to set the Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer Blending mode to Colour, this will darken the red and make it blend with the other Layers. If you want to use a different colour than Red then you can make those adjustments using the Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer.

Step 6

Finally we are going to increase the shadows, make a new Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer under the Original Black and White Adjustment Layer. Reduce the Saturation to -100 and set the Layers Blending Mode to Overlay.

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Our first step is to change the colour space to Lab mode.

Within Lab there are 3 different channels, the luminance channel and 2 colour channels. The luminance channel doesn’t interest us today as we are just going to correct the colour balance rather than contrast. Looking at this image there is a red/magenta cast in the background, that can also be seen in the skin tones of the people. As channel A controls the red/green information, we need to adjust this channel in a curves adjustment layer.

Select a curves adjustment layer as shown above, then in the curves dialog box choose channel A and drag the curve towards the left.

dragging the curve to the left as seen above, changes the colour balance away from red and towards green. I have concentrated on correcting the colour cast in the background but this has left the foreground looking a little green and unappetising.

Using the curves layer mask we can reverse the colour correction for the foreground only. Click on the layer mask and paint with a black brush over the plate and the food to hide the effects of the curves adjustment layer.

The Original image and Final image are shown below, as you can see the plate and food are the original colour while the background is more appropriate.

Original

Final Image

This is just scratching the surface of the colour correction abilities of Lab mode and I recommend Dan Margulis’ book for further reading.

Please feel free to comment and ask any questions below

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We will be using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom.

The “trick” is to use the Color adjustment located at the bottom of the Adjustment Brush sliders (above the brush size).

UPDATE – thanks to the comments from Dan & Matthew Roach who corrected a mistake I made. In this particular adjustment, I opted to use a hue that was more yellow. IF you wish to sample colors from the image, simply place the eyedropper in the color chart then PRESS & HOLD the mouse button while dragging the cursor over the image. (Works much like sampling colors outside of Photoshop). An oversight on my part, quickly caught by our wonderful readers. My apologies for any confusion.

Like sunscreen make sure you get plenty of coverage. A soft edge brush doesn’t hurt for blending. You can also desaturate a little if there’s still a bit of red.

Ta-Da! No more red nose. Yet another instance where we can stay within Lightroom, and keep Photoshop for the bigger tasks.

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Luckily for us, this is fairly easy to repair in Lightroom with a little understanding of colour using the colour wheel below. The colour of the sunburn on our model has a red/magenta tint that we wish to reduce, to do this we can see on the colour wheel that the colour opposite red/magenta is lime green. By adding green to the sunburn, it will reduce the red/magenta and hence lessen the effects of the sunburn.

In the Develop module, go to the Adjustment Brush [K], making sure all the sliders are set to zero and click on the Color box. I do tend to add a little extra to brightness to offset the darkening that sunburn causes, in this case about +8

When you click on the Color Box a pop out colour sample chart shows itself as below

Sample a colour in the green spectrum, I have chosen a lime green as a starting point and also reduced the saturation to 21%. Now choose an appropriate sized brush size and paint over the sunburnt skin. Pressing [O] will toggle the mask view between preview and the red overlay. The image below shows where I have painted with the mask overlay on.

and with the overlay turned off, we can see that the face now has some seriously green toned skin.

Do not worry too much about the green as the next stage should reduce it so that the skin looks healthy once more. Bring up the Adjustment Brush again and make sure the pin is selected for the area you’ve painted over the sunburn. If the pins are not showing press [H] to reveal/hide them.

Click on the Color box once more and reduce the saturation slider from 21% to a level where the green can not longer be seen. In this case, down to 8%. As can be seen in the image below, the sunburn is no longer an issue.

NB! a further tip is to paint different areas of skin with separate adjustment brushes so that you can vary the saturation based on how burnt the skin is.

With a few further changes such as painting on skin smoothing, adding clarity to the eyes and brightening the image, a final image is produced

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and that it has helped you. Please feel free to comment or ask questions below and I shall be happy to answer them if I can.

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­In the example photo, you can see that the person in front’s face has some pretty intense hot spots. The second person has a few, also, which I’ll also take care of, but the first thing I want to do is make the person in the forefront a little darker, and more in keeping with the other person.

To do this I used a slight Curves adjustment, taking the line down towards the darker end of the histogram, in a color photo that would be towards the right bottom corner.

Back in the Layer panel, invert the Curves Adjustment mask by using keyboard shortcut Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) + I with the mask active. Paint in the area you want to darken up with your Brush tool and the foreground set to white.

Soften the edges of the mask with a slight Gaussian blur, to blend and bring the opacity of the Curves Adjustment layer down to around 50%. I felt the brightness of the jeans was making the photo too glarey (made up word alert), so I did a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, using the Auto Select Color icon (the little hand with the finger over the double-sided arrow, in scientific terms.) Once the icon is selected, put your curser, which is now an eyedropper, over the color you want to adjust and move to the left to lower the Saturation, right to increase it. I decreased by 20. Not a huge amount, but enough to lessen the glare some.

Next I did a little subtle manual adjustment to calm down the hotspots in the faces. Using the Eyedropper tool, sample a skin color from one of the faces that’s not in a blown out area. Next, make a new, blank layer at the top of the Layer stack by using keyboard shortcut Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) + J. With your brush tool selected, paint the skin color on this blank layer, covering the hot spots. It doesn’t have to be pretty, just provide coverage.

Change the Layer Blend Mode to Color. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and blur slightly to blend. Keep an eye on the preview that the blur isn’t so high that it no longer covers the hot spots. ­At this point, I still thought the person in the foreground was still a wee bit too bright, so I did a Levels Adjustment, bringing the Shadows (Black) slider in just a little towards the right. As with the Curves Adjustment, I inverted the mask (Crtl on PC, Cmd on a Mac + I) and painted in the area with the brush tool, foreground color set to white, blurred the edges of the mask slightly with a Gaussian Blur to help blend, then lower the Opacity to around 50%.

I wanted to tone down a little of the reddish tone of the photo, so I now did a second Levels Adjustment, with no masking. All we’re going to do in this adjustment is take the Shadow (Black) eyedropper and find one of the darkest areas of the photo. That’s it! Well, almost. Now drop the Opacity back a little. I went down to 50%, as the darks were just too dark.  An added benefit of this step, doing this at this point, after all the little hot spot corrections, serves to further blend the adjustment with the original photo.

I did a couple more little things to improve the photograph. One was getting rid of two distracting background shadow elements. One was just coming out of the side of the women’s head and the other looked like Tipsy was making ninja-like appearance [Caught me! ^TS]. Just a little Clone Stamp tool on a blank layer took care of that.

­The photo’s still not “perfect”, but is considerably better. At least the client thinks so, and that’s what really matters, right? ­There were a number of other ways I could have gone with this; a Levels Adjustment, first, instead of Curves, a Layer Blend Mode, such as Multiply, instead of Curves, etc. Rest assured I did try them all when I did the works, as I almost always do. I picked the one that looked best to me. You might have better luck on your photo with something else. I encourage you to try everything to see what works best on each individual photo!

Author Disclaimer: No one technique is ever “the best” for every situation. Every photo is different and different methods should be explored to find which the best in that particular situation is. That being said, let it be known that I attempt to try and teach many different ways of doing things. If I employ one way and it seems to you, the reader, that another way may have worked as well or better, rest assured that the techniques being used are done so in the interest of creative exploration, not nescient omission. ~JS

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Don’t Flatten!

If you’re like me, you keep an “external original”, an archival scan of the original in its current state of decay, apart from the copy of the image you’ll be restoring. I also make a flattened copy in .tif format of the finished restoration. But I always keep a complete, un-flattened .psd file with all layers intact and a copy of the original at the base of the layer stack (as the “background” layer). Why do I do this? There are many reasons, paranoia being the foremost among them, but also for things such as reference – you never know when someone might ask how you did something or when you, yourself, might wonder the same – or when you might see something you missed or could have done better. Keeping the entire work file keeps the “tweakability” factor viable.  It also makes for quick “before & after” peaks, which show just how far along you are with your restoration!  Yes, my kind of digital photo restoration requires a lot of hard drive storage space…

Work Big and Carry a Small Brush

One reason for scanning a photo in at as high a resolution as possible is that the tighter in you can zoom an area, and still have it remain clear and sharp, the better the finished result will be. If you think about it, fixing a space filled with tons and tons of teeny, tiny little specks and spots, which when viewed regular size looks like a vast solar system of ickiness, zooming in really tight and use a small brush just makes sense. Well, it does to me, anyway. The larger the brush you use, in many cases, the worse the repair looks.

Stay True To the Original

Seriously, this is photo restoration we’re talking about, not RETOUCHING! Grandma doesn’t need wrinkle reduction – she earned every one of those wrinkles and they are part and parcel of the story of the photo. If you must manipulate a photograph for some reason, do it in context. Let me explain what I mean by “manipulate”. Sometimes, in the course of a restoration, I’ve found it beneficial to repair, or replace an element, add a bit of grass texture, replace a tree or repair an eye using the other eye, or even one from another photo of the person. In one recent project, I replaced facial features that had been drawn in with marker and correction fluid on an over exposed photo. The main considerations when doing this is to always keep it “real”, only replacing or enhancing what is or was actually there, and to do it in a way that, hopefully, no one will ever know it was actually added. In my aforementioned recent project, the facial features were mere hints of features, using faces from photos I actually took, not drawing things in, faded so much into the photo that you have to really look to see them. Since the faces were so far from the camera, this worked very well, even better when I found out that the photo in question will be enlarged considerably and put in a museum. The facial features won’t be readily discernable, but the ink and correction fluid would have been.

Don’t Give Up

Even if you think that there’s absolutely no way to fix whatever it is that is wrong with a particular photo, there probably is. I’ve restored a lot of photos, thousands of them, and believe me when I say that very, very few have been un-restorable; the majority of them, now that I think on it, were from my early days and I could probably come up with some way to fix them, at least a bit, now. Sometimes you have to try everything you can possibly think of, you may need to ask others for advice, you may even need to invent your own methods, but, as my Grandmother used to say, where there’s a will, there’s a William! When it’s all said and done, you may well find that you really can’t fix it, maybe you just don’t have the time or the Photoshop skill to make it happen, maybe the photo really is beyond all hope. But at the very least, you may learn something new and will hopefully feel better for not having thrown in the towel!

Cropping Is For Wimps

This is not a tip as much as a comment. If you’re going to work and learn and be the very best you can be at digital photo restoration, quit cropping all the “around the edges” damage –every single time -and learn how to restore it! There. I said I it. Which brings me to…

Take Pride

There have been a lot of arguments (most of which I inadvertently start) over whether it’s unnecessary to repair all the damage you can in a photograph, or just fix as much as you think the average person (or the customer) will see or what is expedient in terms of time vs. amount charged. My take on this is different, apparently, than most in the professional digital restoration field; in that I take pride in my work to the extent that I want it done as well as I can possibly do it. For me if that means repairing every little speck and spot, so be it. If I end up losing money on the deal, I’m ok with that, also. As it is, I look back at the majority of my work a year after I’ve done it and shake my head that I could have done so much better. How much worse would the self-chastisement be if I let things go that I felt were just “good enough”? We all have our own standards and our own reason for those standards (time, money, whatever), but all I know is I wouldn’t want someone with less than the highest standards working on my family photographs. Then again, that’s just me…

Black & White Rules

Things are easier in black & white. Seriously, nine times out of ten, restoring a black & white photo, or converting it to B&W before restoration makes the process easier all around. But just because it’s easier, doesn’t always make it better – and sometimes it does. Confused yet? Sometimes the patina of an old photo just rocks and you want to keep it, so B&W isn’t an option, but you should at least put a B&W adjustment (non-destructive) on it to see what happens. You can always put a faux “color wash” on it to mimic the tones of the patina later. I’ve also found it useful, at times, to restore with the original aged tones intact and do the B&W adjustment at the end to even out any tonal inconsistencies. One word of caution about B&W adjustments, though: be careful to not do the same thing on every photo you restore. You want people to know it was restored by you because of the excellent quality of the work itself, not because it looks exactly the same, every time. This also applies to things like colorization. If all you ever do is colorize every old photo you run across, you become a bit of a one trick pony. Change things up and grow!

A Well Done Mask Is a Thing of Beauty

I’ve been called mask obsessed by some, but in my opinion a well done mask is never a waste of time! Whatever your mask making method of choice is, be it Quick Mask, Calculations, adding a vector mask and painting it in, whatever, taking the time to paint in a concise mask will serve you well when it comes time to lightening certain areas while darkening others, or when colorizing, or doing any number of things to improve your photo. While masking can seem daunting, like anything else, once you learn and become comfortable with the process, it gets easier. I highly recommend learning the art of masking!

Curves Are My Best Friend

I always try many ways to tackle a restoration problem. Even though I might think “Oh, I can do that in two minutes by using (insert random filter/tool/adjustment name, here)”, I still will try at least a few other methods just to see if maybe, maybe it will bring about a better result, just because you never know. But more often than not, I find myself using Curves Adjustments. In almost every restoration I do, in fact, Curves figure in some way, usually to lighten or darken certain areas, or to add highlights or shadow. Curves have become a mainstay in my restoration toolkit. But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t

Try Other Things

Sometimes Curves won’t work, or something else actually works better. If I automatically stuck with Curves, I’d never know that. That’s how I found out that the Dodge or Burn tools work better in some instances than Curves. Or that Variations sometimes do a better job at color correction than Curves, or Levels, or anything else. You never know until you try, “try” being the operative word, here. Experimentation is the key to learning, at least for me, and without learning you start to atrophy.

Like I said at the beginning, these are a few things I picked up along the way that have made a difference in my world. I’m not putting these things out there as the be all and end all of the restoration world. You may have vastly different opinions which is, of course, your right. Since I know everyone has personal favorites, I’d love to see some of yours in the comments!

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