Basic edits like exposure fixes and sharpening are fine if all you want to make are simple adjustments. But Elements also gives you tools to make sophisticated changes that aren’t hard to apply, and that can make the difference between a ho-hum photo and a fabulous one. This chapter introduces you to some advanced editing maneuvers that can help you rescue damaged photos or give good ones a little extra zing.
The first part of the chapter shows how to get rid of blemishes—not only those that affect skin, but also dust, scratches, stains, and other photographic imperfections. You’ll also learn some powerful color-improving techniques, including using the Color Curves tool, which is a great way to enhance your image’s contrast and color.
Then you’ll learn to use the exciting Recompose tool, which lets you change the size and shape of your photos, eliminate empty areas between subjects in an image, and even get rid of unwanted elements in your pictures, all without distorting the parts you want to keep. This amazing feature works so well that nobody seeing the results would ever suspect the photo wasn’t originally shot that way.
It’s an imperfect world, but in your photos, it doesn’t have to be. Elements gives you powerful tools for fixing your subject’s flaws: You can erase crow’s feet and blemishes, eliminate power lines in an otherwise perfect view, or even hide objects you wish weren’t in your photo. Not only that, but these same tools are great for fixing problems like tears, folds, and stains—the great foes of photoscanning veterans. With a little effort, you can bring back photos that seem beyond help. Two of the most important ways to do this are cloning and healing. Cloning lets you patch bad areas by hiding them with material from elsewhere in a photo. Healing is similar, but when you use this method Elements also evaluates the area around the spot you’re fixing and then blends your repair into what’s already there. You’ll need to use both methods to fix badly damaged photos. Figure 9-1 shows an example of the kind of restoration you can accomplish with Elements (and a little persistence).
![Top: Here’s a section of a water-damaged family portrait. The grandmother’s face is almost obliterated.Bottom: The same image after repairing it with Elements. It took a lot of cloning and healing to get this result, but if you keep at it, you can do the kind of work that would have required professional help before Elements.If you’re interested in restoring old photos, check out Katrin Eismann’s books on the subject (Photoshop Restoration and Retouching [New Riders, 2006] is a good one to start with). They cover full-featured Photoshop, but you can adapt most of the techniques for Elements. You might also want to read Matt Kloskowski’s The Photoshop Elements 5 Restoration and Retouching Book (Peachpit, 2007). (Although it’s for Elements 5 for Windows, you can still use the techniques in later versions of Elements for Mac or PC.)](httpatomoreillycomsourceoreillyimages906933.png.jpg)
Figure 9-1. Top: Here’s a section of a water-damaged family portrait. The grandmother’s face is almost obliterated. Bottom: The same image after repairing it with Elements. It took a lot of cloning and healing to get this result, but if you keep at it, you can do the kind of work that would have required professional help before Elements. If you’re interested in restoring old photos, check out Katrin Eismann’s books on the subject (Photoshop Restoration and Retouching [New Riders, 2006] is a good one to start with). They cover full-featured Photoshop, but you can adapt most of the techniques for Elements. You might also want to read Matt Kloskowski’s The Photoshop Elements 5 Restoration and Retouching Book (Peachpit, 2007). (Although it’s for Elements 5 for Windows, you can still use the techniques in later versions of Elements for Mac or PC.)
Elements gives you three main tools for this kind of work:
The Spot Healing brush is the easiest way to repair photos. Just drag over the spot you want to fix, and Elements searches the surrounding area and blends that info into the trouble spot, making it indistinguishable from the background. What’s more, you get a Content-Aware option, bringing over one of the most popular features from Photoshop (although the Elements version is much more limited; see The Spot Healing Brush: Fixing Small Areas). When you use the Content Aware feature, Elements analyzes your photo so it can create new material that looks like part of the original image. This makes the Spot Healing Brush a truly versatile tool for making seamless fixes.
The Healing brush works much like the Spot Healing brush, only you tell the Healing brush which part of your photo to use as a source for the material you want to blend in. This tool is better suited to large areas, because you don’t have to worry about inadvertently dragging in unwanted details.
The Clone Stamp works like the Healing brush in that you sample a good area and apply it to the spot you want to fix. But instead of blending the repair in, the Clone Stamp actually covers the bad area with the replacement. This tool is best for situations when you want to completely hide the underlying area, as opposed to letting any of what’s already there blend into your repair (which is how things work with the Healing brushes). The Clone Stamp is also your best option for creating a realistic copy of details that are elsewhere in your photo. You can clone some leaves to fill in a bare branch, for instance, or replace a knothole in a fence board with good wood.
All three tools work similarly: You drag each one over the area you want to change. It’s as simple as using a paintbrush. In fact, each of these tools requires you to choose a brush like the ones you’ll learn about in Chapter 12. Brush selection is pretty straightforward; you’ll learn the basics in this chapter.
Tip
To smooth out blotchy or blemished skin, check out the Surface Blur filter, explained on Improving skin texture with the Surface Blur filter. It’s good to try for minor touch-ups that affect large areas. In contrast, the tools described in this section are better for fixing individual imperfections, like pimples or scars.
The Spot Healing brush is great at fixing minor blemishes like pimples, lipstick smudges, stray lint, and so on. Simply paint over the area you want to repair, and Elements searches the surrounding regions and blends them into the spot you’re brushing. Figure 9-2 shows what a great job this tool can do. (If you’d like to experiment with this tool, download the file borage.jpg from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.)
Figure 9-2. The trick to using the Spot Healing brush is to work on tiny areas. If you choose too large a brush or drag over too large an area, you’re more likely to pick up undesired shades and details from the surrounding area. Top: Say you want to show off your fine crop of borage, but something’s been attacking the leaves. Simply grab a brush that’s just barely bigger than the blemish, like the one shown here. Bottom: One click with the Spot Healing brush and you have a truly invisible fix. It only took a few clicks to repair all the brown spots on this leaf.
The Spot Healing brush’s ability to borrow information from surrounding areas is great in some situations, but a drawback in others. The larger the area you drag the brush over, the wider Elements searches for replacement material. So if there’s contrasting material close to the area you’re trying to fix, it can get pulled into the repair. For instance, if you’re trying to fix a spot on an eyelid, you may wind up with some of the color from the eye itself mixed in with your repair.
You get the best results from this brush when you choose a brush size that barely covers the spot you’re trying to fix. If you need to drag to fix an oblong area, for instance, use the smallest brush width that covers the flaw. The Spot Healing brush also works much better when there’s a large surrounding area that looks the way you want your repaired spot to look.
Tip
Sometimes you can help Elements out by making a selection first, to limit the area where the brush can search for replacement material.
You won’t believe how easy it is to fix problem areas with this tool. All you do is:
Activate the Spot Healing brush.
Click the Healing brush icon (the Band-Aid) in the Tools panel or press J, and then choose the Spot Healing brush—the one with the dotted selection lines extending from it—from the pop-out menu.
Choose a brush just barely bigger than the flaw you’re trying to fix.
You can adjust your brush size using the Options bar’s Size slider or by pressing ] (the close bracket key) for a larger brush or [ (the open bracket key) for a smaller brush.
The Spot Healing brush is set to use Content-Aware (explained in a sec), and that’s the best setting to try first.
Click the bad spot.
If the brush doesn’t quite cover the flaw, drag over the blemished area.
When you release the mouse button, Elements repairs the blemish.
You may see a weird dark gray area as you drag. Don’t worry—it’s just there to show you where you’re brushing and it disappears when Elements fixes the photo after you let go.
The Spot Healing brush has four Options bar settings:
Brush. You can use this pull-down menu to choose a different brush style (see Chapter 12 for more about brushes), but you’re usually best off sticking to the standard brush that Elements starts with and just changing the size, if necessary.
Size. Use this box to set the brush’s size. You want a brush just barely wide enough to cover the blemish you’re healing.
Type. These radio buttons let you adjust how the brush works. Proximity Match tells Elements to search the surrounding area for replacement pixels, and Create Texture tells it to blend only from the area you drag it over. Choosing Content-Aware tells the program to do some fancy figuring to invent new material to blend in with the existing photo (see Figure 9-3).
Your best bet will usually be to try Content-Aware first. If that doesn’t do a good job, undo what you did and try Proximity Match instead. Generally speaking, if Proximity Match doesn’t work well, you’ll get better results by switching to the regular Healing brush than by choosing Create Texture, though Adobe suggests that you may like the results you get from Create Texture better if you drag over a spot more than once.
Figure 9-3. The Content-Aware option for the Healing Brushes can give you amazing results with some photos, but it can also result in cases of “so near and yet so far,” as you can see here. Top: The only day you could get to the beach with your camera, there were traffic cones everywhere. Bottom: The Content-Aware option did a great job of zapping the big wooden post, but large areas like all those cones make it confused about what to use as replacement material. You could keep trying the Spot Healing brush over and over, but at this point it would be faster to use the Clone Stamp (page 315) for that area instead.
Sample All Layers. Turn this checkbox on if you want the brush to look for replacement material in all your photo’s visible layers. If you leave it off, Elements only uses material from the active layer. (Another reason to turn this on: if you created a new, blank layer to heal on so you can blend your work in later by adjusting the healed area’s opacity.)
Sometimes you get great results with the Spot Healing brush on a larger area if it’s surrounded by a field that’s similar in tone to the spot you’re trying to fix, especially if you use the Content-Aware option, but you may find that you need to do extra work for a perfect result (see Figure 9-3). Sometimes you can switch to Proximity Match and finish up, or you may need the regular Healing Brush (explained next) or the Clone Stamp (The Clone Stamp) to get things just perfect.
The Healing brush lets you fix much bigger areas than you can usually manage with the Spot Healing brush. The main difference between the two tools is that with the regular Healing brush, you choose the area that gets blended into the repair. The blending makes your repair look natural, as Figure 9-4 shows.
Figure 9-4. Left: After you Alt-click/Option-click to choose your repair source, the brush’s cursor shows you the area it plans to blend. Here, for instance, inside the cursor’s circle you can see the part of the waterfall you’ll be blending in, rather than the lamppost you’ll be covering up. (If this bothers you, see page 315 to learn how to get a regular, empty cursor.) Right: It took three brushstrokes to eliminate this lamppost (one for the water, one for the grass, and one for where they intersect), but you can see how quickly this method gets you 99% of the way to a natural-looking fix. There’s a little bit of haze in the grass right along the edge of the cliff that might benefit from a little touching up with the Clone Stamp (page 315), but that only requires another click or two.
Tip
You may want to give the Spot Healing brush’s Content-Aware option a try for larger areas, too. If it fails, then go with the regular Healing brush instead. And sometimes you’ll want to use both brushes. For example, in Figure 9-4, the regular Healing brush does a good job hiding the lamppost where it was in front of the water and the ground, but you might want to try the Spot Healing brush’s Content-Aware option to get a good transition line between the two.
The basic procedure for using the Healing brush is similar to that for the Spot Healing brush: Drag over the flaw you want to fix. The difference is that with the Healing brush, you first Alt-click/Option-click where you want Elements to look for replacement pixels. The repair material (which Elements calls your “source”) doesn’t have to be nearby; in fact, you can sample from a totally different photo if you like (to do that, just arrange both photos in your workspace so you can easily move the cursor from one to the other).
It’s almost as simple to use the Healing brush as it is to use the Spot Healing brush:
Activate the Healing brush.
Click the Healing brush’s icon (the Band-Aid) in the Tools panel or press J and choose it from the pop-out menu.
Find a good spot to use in the repair and Alt-click/Option-click it.
When you Alt-click/Option-click the good spot, your cursor temporarily turns into a circle with crosshairs in it to indicate that this is the point from which Elements will retrieve your repair material. (If you want to use material from a different photo, both the source photo and the one you’re repairing have to be in the same color mode—see Selecting a Color Mode.)
Drag over the area you want to repair.
You can see where Elements is sampling the repair material from because it puts a + in that spot. As with the Spot Healing brush, the area you drag over turns dark until you release the mouse button.
When you let go of your mouse, Elements blends the sampled area into the problem area.
You often won’t know how effective you were until Elements is through working its magic (it may take a few seconds for the program to finish its calculations and blend in the repair). If you don’t like the result, press Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z to undo it and try again.
The Healing brush offers you quite a few choices in the Options bar:
Brush. Click the brush thumbnail for a pop-out palette that lets you customize the size, shape, and hardness of your brush cursor (see Picking and Using a Basic Brush). The standard brush generally works well, so you’ll probably just need to adjust its size. If you have a graphics tablet, you can use the menu at the bottom of the palette to tell Elements you want to control the brush size by how hard you press on the stylus or the stylus’s scroll wheel.
Mode. You can choose from various blend modes (Blend Mode) here, but most of the time, you want one of the top two options: Normal and Replace. Normal is usually your best choice, but if the replacement pixels give the area you working on a visibly different texture than the surrounding area, choose Replace instead, which preserves the grain of your photo.
Source. You can sample an area to use as a replacement (by leaving the Sampled radio button turned on), or you can blend in a pattern (by turning on the Pattern radio button). Using the Healing brush with patterns is explained on The Healing Brush.
Pattern thumbnail. If you turn on the Pattern radio button, Elements activates this box. Click it to select a pattern.
Aligned. If you leave this checkbox turned off, all the material Elements uses comes from the area that you first defined as your source point. Turn on this checkbox, and Elements keeps sampling new material in your source as you use the tool; the sampling follows the direction of your brush. Even if you let go of the mouse button, Elements continues to sample new material as long as you continue brushing.
Generally, for both the Healing brush and the Clone Stamp (see below), it’s easier to leave this setting turned off. You can still change your source point by Alt-clicking/Option-clicking another spot, but you often get better results if you make the decision about when to move on to another location rather than letting Elements decide.
Sample All Layers. This checkbox tells Elements to sample from all the visible layers in the area where you set your source point. Leave it turned off and Elements samples only the active layer. You would turn it on if you wanted to heal on a new, blank layer.
Overlay Options. Click this icon (the overlapping gray squares) for a pop-out menu where you can turn off or adjust the visible overlay for your photo (the filled cursor). The menu lets you see a floating, ghostly overlay of the source area where you’re sampling in relation to your original, so you can tell exactly how things line up for accurate healing. You can also adjust the overlay’s opacity or invert it (make the light areas dark and the dark areas light so that you can see details more clearly) for a better view. The Clipped option pins the overlay to your brush so you see only a brush-sized piece of overlay rather than one that covers the entire image. Turning on the Auto Hide checkbox makes the overlay disappear when you click so it’s not in your way as you work. When you first use the Healing brush, it’s set to use a Clipped overlay. Just turn off all the settings in this menu if you want an empty circle for your cursor.
Note
The Clone Stamp (explained next) has the same Overlay Options settings as the Healing brush, and the settings you choose for one tool also apply when you switch to the other tool.
You can also heal on a separate layer. The advantage of doing this is that if you find the end result is a little too much—your granny suddenly looks like a Stepford wife, say—you can back things off a bit by reducing the opacity of the healed layer to let the original show through. This is also a good plan when using the Clone Stamp (explained next). Just press Ctrl+Shift+N/⌘-Shift-N to create a new layer and then, in the Options bar, turn on the Sample All Layers checkbox.
The Clone Stamp is like the Healing brush in that you add material from a source point that you select, but the Clone Stamp doesn’t blend in the new material—it just covers up the underlying area. This makes the Clone Stamp great for when you don’t want to leave any trace of what you’re repairing. Figure 9-5 shows an example of when cloning is a better choice than healing.
Figure 9-5. Here’s an example of when you’d choose cloning over healing. Top: Say you want to get rid of the distracting white part of this banner. Bottom left: Using content-aware healing (page 311) gets you started, but it also heals away part of the drainpipe and duplicates the strap holding it to the building. Bottom right: By using the Clone Stamp in concert with the Spot Healing Brush, you can remove the white part of the banner and extend the pipe.
Using the Clone Stamp is much like using the Healing brush, but you get different results:
Click its icon (the rubber stamp) in the Tools panel or press S, and then choose it from the pop-out menu.
Tip
You can clone on a separate layer, just as you can use the Healing tool on a dedicated layer. It’s a good idea to clone on a separate layer, since cloning is so much more opaque than healing, plus it lets you adjust the opacity of your repair afterwards. So before you start cloning, press Shift+Ctrl+N/Shift-⌘-N to create a new layer and then turn on Sample All Layers in the Options bar.
Find the spot you want to repair.
You may need to zoom way, way in to get a good enough look at what you’re doing. (The Zoom Tool tells you how to adjust your view.)
Find a good spot to sample as a replacement for the bad area.
You want an area that has the same tone as the spot you’re fixing. The Clone Stamp doesn’t do any blending the way the Healing brush does, so any tone difference will be pretty obvious.
Alt-click/Option-click the spot you want to clone from.
When you click, the cursor turns to a circle with crosshairs in it, indicating the source point for the repair. (Once you’re actually working with the Clone Stamp, you see a + marking the sampling point.)
Click the spot you want to cover.
Elements puts whatever you just selected on top of your image, concealing the original. You can drag with the Clone Stamp, but that makes it act like it’s in Aligned mode (described in the previous list), so it’s often preferable to click several times for areas that are larger than your sample. (The only difference between real Aligned mode and what you get from dragging is that with dragging, when you let go of the mouse, your source point snaps back to where you started. If you turn on the Aligned checkbox, your source point stays where you stopped.)
Continue until you’ve covered the area.
With the Clone Stamp, unlike the Healing brush, what you see as you click is what you get—Elements doesn’t do any further blending or smoothing.
The choices you make in the Clone Stamp’s Options bar are important in getting the best results:
Brush. You can use this pull-down menu to select a different brush style (see Chapter 12 for more about brushes), but the standard style usually works pretty well. If the soft edges of the cloned areas bother you, you may be tempted to switch to a harder brush, but that will likely make your photo look like you threw confetti on it, because hard edges won’t blend with what’s already there.
Size. Choose a brush that’s just big enough to select your sample without picking up other details that you don’t want in your repair. It can be tempting to clone huge chunks to speed things up, but most of the time you’ll do better using the smallest brush that gets the sample you want.
Mode. You can choose any blend mode (Blend Mode) for cloning, but Normal is usually your best bet. Other modes can create interesting special effects.
Opacity. Elements automatically uses 100-percent opacity for cloning, but you can reduce this setting to let some details of the original show through.
Aligned. This setting works exactly the way it does for the Healing brush (The Healing Brush: Fixing Larger Areas). Turn it on and Elements keeps sampling at a uniform distance from your cursor as you clone; turn it off and it keeps putting down the same source material. Figure 9-6 shows an example of when you’d turn on Aligned. (If you drag rather than click with the Clone Stamp, Elements turns on the Aligned checkbox automatically.)
Figure 9-6. One way to get rid of the power line in this photo is to use the Clone Stamp’s Aligned option. (The thick power line originally entered this photo at the upper left, above the smaller lines you can still see in the background.) By choosing a brush barely larger than the thick power line and sampling just above the line, you can replace the entire thing in one long sweep, despite the many changes in the background behind it.
Sample All Layers. When you turn on this checkbox, Elements takes its replacement material from all the visible layers in the area where you set your source point. When it’s off, Elements samples only the active layer.
Overlay Options. The Clone Stamp starts out using a clipped overlay, the same way the Healing brush does. Your options for adjusting the overlay are the same, too (The Clone Stamp). If you want an empty cursor, just turn off all the options in this drop-down menu. The settings you choose here apply when you use the Healing brush and vice versa.
The Clone Stamp shares its spot in the Tools panel with the Pattern Stamp, which is explained on The Pattern Stamp. (You can tell which is which because the Pattern Stamp’s icon has a blue checkerboard to its left.)
The Clone Stamp is a powerful tool, but it’s crotchety, too. See the box below for some suggestions on how to make it behave.
Figure 9-7. Left: You can reset the Clone Stamp (or, for that matter, any Elements tool) by clicking the tiny arrow at the left end of the Options bar (circled). Right: From the pop-up menu, choose Reset Tool. (If you want to reset the whole Tools panel, choose Reset All Tools instead.) This clears up a lot of the little problems you may have when trying to make a tool behave.