What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>How to eliminate dust and scratches from photos
</objective> <objective>How to get rid of red eye—and green eye
</objective> <objective>Ways to remove other small flaws in your pictures
</objective> </feature>Few things are more annoying than digging through your photo stash, finding the perfect picture for your current project, and then discovering that it’s all scratched and everyone in it has red eyes. Photoshop Elements doesn’t have a single tool that gets rid of all these flaws instantly, but it certainly has all the tools you need to do the job pretty darn quickly.
Red eye can be a problem any time you use a flash to take photos. It happens because the subject’s pupil doesn’t have time to contract before the flash’s light passes through it and is bounced back out again. Because the area next to the iris is full of blood vessels, the reflected light appears to be red. Dust and scratches, on the other hand, usually show up on scanned pictures, either on the print or slide you scanned or on the scanner bed. You end up with similar flaws in digital camera pictures if there’s a smudge or dirt on the camera lens.
You already know how to fix quite a few image problems. Let’s review: In Hour 6, “Making Quick Fixes,” you learned how to make quick fixes to solve problems related to lighting, color, and sharpness. (We look at more sophisticated ways to address these issues in Hour 14, “Too Light/Too Dark: Adjusting Brightness, Contrast, and Color.”) In Hour 11, “Composing and Cropping Your Pictures,” you learned how to crop and rotate a picture to improve its composition and remove distracting elements. And in Hour 12, “Straightening, Skewing, and Distorting an Image,” you learned about straightening crooked images and fixing flawed perspective.
All these methods focus on fixing the picture as a whole. Now we zoom in on the details and work with just part of an image at a time. First we look at ways to remove noticeable flaws from a picture, things that were really there when you took the shot but that you didn’t really want in your picture. These are the zits and cellulite of your photo collection, and getting rid of them in a picture is way easier than getting rid of them in real life.
In this section, we work with a photo of a boy and his grandmother collecting shells on the beach (see Figure 13.1); you can download beachcombers.jpg from the book’s website at www.informit.com/title/9780672330179 and work along if you like. It’s not fabulous, but it has potential. The first thing I want to do with this picture is crop it—there’s way too much going on here, and we need to focus on the people in the foreground and get rid of some of the distracting background.
I’m going to print this photo and put it in a square frame, so I start by switching to the Crop tool and choosing “5 × 5 in” from the Aspect Ratio menu in the Options bar. Figure 13.2 shows how the picture looks after I’ve cropped it; you can see how that step alone gets rid of a lot of the picture’s problem areas. But we still have a few issues to deal with.
When you’re doing a speed clean of your house right before guests arrive, what’s the easiest thing to do with clutter? Right—get it out of sight. The equivalent action in Photoshop Elements is to get rid of clutter by placing something in front of it. For this picture, that means finding a nice, clean patch of sand and using it to cover up what’s left of the group of people sitting at the left side of the photo. We don’t know them, we don’t think they’re particularly interesting, and they’re definitely distracting, so we cropped out most of them, but we still have a pair of legs and a cooler to get rid of.
We need to take care with our sand patch so that it doesn’t cover anything we don’t want to hide, and we also need to make sure that the patch blends well with the background, with no hard edges showing. Here’s how I did it:
Using the Lasso tool, select the area around the object you want to get rid of—in this case, the legs and the cooler—including a bit of a margin. This selection determines the shape of the patch, so it’s important not to make it too skimpy.
Choose Select, Feather to give the selection area a soft edge; in this case, I used a Radius of 10 pixels. This step helps the patch blend with the sand around it so that you can’t see its edges.
Still with the Lasso tool, drag the selection to an area that makes a suitable patch. For my patch, I used a swath of sand from the middle of the picture (see Figure 13.3).
Press Ctrl+V to paste the patch. This creates a new layer in the process. You won’t notice any difference in the picture at this point because the pasted area is directly on top of the area from which you copied it. If you want to see just the patch, you can hide the Background layer in the Layers palette (click the eye button) and then show it again so you can move the patch to its final position.
Switch to the Move tool and drag the patch so that it covers the object you’re trying to remove. Positioning the patch correctly was easy for me because its straight left edge butts up against the edge of the image (see Figure 13.4).
You might be interested to know that traditional Photoshop has a specialized Patch tool, which automates the feathering and copying part of this technique. So if you find yourself using this patch method quite a bit, you might want to consider upgrading to Photoshop CS3. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Patch tool show up in the next release of Photoshop Elements.
Removing Small Objects with the Clone Stamp Tool
Copying and pasting a patch can work very well to hide unwanted objects, but the background around the objects needs to be fairly homogenous. If the objects you want to get rid of are surrounded by multiple colors and textures, a patch won’t do the trick; you need to pull out the Clone Stamp tool instead. In our example picture, the girls walking into the water are surrounded by grayish water, sand, and white foam—so it’s time for the Clone Stamp. Again, feel free to follow along with beachcombers.jpg, if you like. These are the steps needed to get rid of the extra people left in this picture:
Zoom in on the object you want to get rid of—in this case, the two girls. Make sure that you can see them clearly but that you also have plenty of room around them to borrow the pixels you’re going to stamp over them (see Figure 13.5).
Switch to the Clone Stamp tool. It looks like a rubber stamp because it can pick up part of a picture and stamp it somewhere else in the image. We’ll use it to clone waves over the girls.
In the Options bar, set your brush size to about 40 pixels, and leave the Mode menu set to Normal and the Opacity menu set to 100%. Make sure that the brush tip is soft-edged, for the same reason that you feathered the patch selection in the previous section—so your changes will blend with the image around them. You can tell which brushes are soft-edged because their previews have fuzzy edges.
Now look at your Layers palette. If you’ve been working along and haven’t closed the file, you should have a Background layer, which contains the original image, and Layer 1, which contains only the sandy patch we created a little while ago. You’re going to stamp on Layer 1, so make sure it’s active, but you want your stamp to use the Background layer as the source, so check All Layers in the Options bar.
By the Way
If you leave All Layers unchecked, you need to be working on the same layer that you’re using as a clone source. With All Layers turned on, the Clone Stamp picks up pixels from all the layers instead of just the one you’re working on—which, in this case, is mostly transparent and, therefore, not a really good source for a stamp image.
Click to put a check in the Aligned box. This setting determines where the source pixels come from for each click or stroke with the Clone Stamp. When Aligned is turned off, Photoshop Elements goes back to the source point each time you release the mouse button and click again. When it’s turned on, the area from which the stamp is picking up pixels moves around as you paint around the area where you began stamping. The point at which the stamp will pick up pixels on your next click is always shown with a cross.
Look at the color and pattern of the waves near the point where you want to start covering things up. Pick a spot elsewhere in the water that matches fairly closely, and Alt+click to choose that as your source point.
Click, or click and drag, to clone over the girls (see Figure 13.6). Go slowly until you get a feel for how the Clone Stamp works; short strokes usually work best. As the color of the water around the girls changes from blue around their heads to brownish gray at their feet, make sure the origin point is in a matching area.
Well, the picture is a lot less cluttered now. It could still use some pizzazz; maybe I’ll have to add some things later.
I hope this won’t shock you, but the first thing I want to say about fixing red eye has nothing to do with Photoshop Elements: Stop red eye before it starts by using the red-eye reduction mode of your camera, if it has one.
Now, we both know that red eye reduction, which uses a preflash to encourage the subject’s pupils to contract before the photo is taken, doesn’t always work. But it can certainly cut down on the amount of time you spend fixing red eye after the fact. Just be sure to warn your subjects that you’re not done taking the picture until they’ve seen two flashes.
You can cut down on red eye in your photos in a few other ways; it’s worth giving some of these a try:
Use a bounce flash; this means reflecting the flash’s light off a light-colored surface facing the photo subject instead of pointing the flash directly at the people you’re photographing.
Use an external flash that you can move away from the camera so that its light hits the subject at an angle instead of straight on.
Take pictures without a flash, but be careful to stabilize the camera before you shoot so that you don’t shake it while the shutter is open.
Have your subject look over your shoulder instead of straight at you.
Brighten the room lighting so that the subject’s pupils contract as much as possible before the flash activates.
If, despite all your efforts, you still have pictures marred by red eye, you can fix the problem pretty easily using one of the following techniques.
This poor little girl has a really bad case of red eye (see Figure 13.7, here and in the color section). Fortunately, Photoshop Elements offers a number of automated ways to fix her problem. If I’d taken the photo on my own camera, I could have chosen to have Photoshop Elements automatically remove red eye when I imported the photos from the camera. I scanned this particular photo, and Photoshop Elements can detect and remove red eye while scanning, too. In fact, I had to go to some trouble to make sure that the red eye problem still existed by the time I got the photo into Photoshop Elements.
I can fix the problem pretty easily right in the Organizer by clicking the Fix tab and then clicking the Auto Red Eye Fix button. Or I can switch to the Editor’s Quick Fix mode and click the Auto button next to Red Eye Fix.
But if none of that works (or, for some reason, doesn’t appeal to me), I can reach for the Red Eye Removal tool. It’s available in both Quick Fix and Full Edit modes within the Editor, and it’s almost as easy to use as all those auto methods. All you have to do is either click with it in the middle of a red spot or drag a marquee around the red spot. Rinse and repeat for the other eye, and you’re all set!
Fixing Red Eye from Scratch
Sometimes all of Photoshop Elements’ red eye fixing magic doesn’t do the trick—or it does too much. With some images, the program just can’t seem to find the red, even when you indicate it with the Red Eye Removal tool. Other times, it gets the red eye out, all right, but it also removes red from other parts of the picture. In these cases, you just have to fix the red eye manually. Here’s how:
Zoom way, way in on the red area in the first eye.
Use any tool you like to select the red area. You can try the Magic Wand or the Quick Selection tool; the Lasso tool also works well. This time, I used the Elliptical Marquee tool; then I chose Select, Refine Edge to adjust the selection’s size and give it a bit of a soft edge with a Feather setting of 1.1 pixels. Click OK.
Press Shift+Ctrl+U, or choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color. This gets rid of the red, but it’s replaced with an unattractive gray (see Figure 13.8).
Without dropping the selection, switch to the Brush tool and choose a new Foreground color of black or dark brown.
Increase the size of the Brush until it covers the entire selection, and set the Opacity to about 20% and the Mode to Darken. Then click the Airbrush button on the Options bar next to the Opacity menu; this option allows paint to accumulate through repeated clicking in the same area, giving you greater control over the intensity of the color you’re applying.
Click once over the selection, and then take a look at the results. You need to click several more times, but exactly how many is up to you. The object here is to produce a nice, dark pupil without eliminating the white highlights, which add life to the eyes (see Figure 13.9).
This manual red eye removal technique also works on animal eyes. Most often, animals’ eyes reflect a flash with green, but you’ll occasionally also see white, blue, yellow, or other colors. Photoshop Elements’ automated tools work only with red eye, not green eye, so this manual process is the only option for that type of correction.
It’s not always possible to start with a perfectly clean image, but you can avoid introducing more dust and scratches into the equation. To this end, always clean your scanner bed before you begin scanning. That means cleaning both the glass and the inside of the lid: As soon as you close the lid, everything that’s on it is transferred to the glass. I like to use alcohol for cleaning, but in a pinch, I use grocery store glass cleaner. When I’ve done the best I can to get a good scan of a picture, the rest of the cleanup goes on in Photoshop Elements.
You’d think that Dust & Scratches would be the solution to any problem with dust and scratches on a picture. Not quite—but it’s definitely one of the tools you can apply to fix the problem. Unfortunately, Photoshop Elements doesn’t actually know what all the little marks on your picture are. Some of them are dust, some of them are scratches, and some of them are the freckles that your grandfather was so proud of. But with the Dust & Scratches filter, any marks that fit the criteria you set for size and contrast with the surrounding area are blurred out of existence—which is not what you want to do to Grandpa’s freckles.
That said, let’s take a look at what the filter can do. Start by choosing Filter, Noise, Dust & Scratches (see Figure 13.10). The dialog contains just two sliders. Radius determines how much blurring takes place, and Threshold controls how different from their backgrounds any specks of dust must be for the filter to affect them. Lower Threshold values mean that the filter finds more specks of dust; higher ones leave the less obnoxious specks alone. If you set the Threshold all the way to 255, you can move the Radius slider back and forth all day long, and the image won’t be affected at all.
The best strategy when working with the Dust & Scratches filter is to alternate in dragging the two sliders. First apply a Radius setting of 1 pixel, then drag the Threshold slider to the right a bit to restrict the areas affected by the blurring. Then increase the Radius setting a bit more, and drag the Threshold slider to the right again to regain some edge detail.
You might notice that the Dust & Scratches filter removes small, bright highlights on shiny objects or tones them way down. That’s because Photoshop Elements can’t tell the difference between these tiny white specks (highlights) and those tiny white specks (dust). Experiment with the settings until you reach a compromise. Or, if you’re up to more of a challenge, you can select the entire picture and then remove areas that have bright highlights from the selection; the Selection Brush is a good tool for this (see Figure 13.11). I like to bring up the Dust & Scratches filter first, check for image areas that don’t fare well under its effects, and then click Cancel. Then I press Ctrl+A to select the whole image, and I switch to the Selection Brush tool in Mask mode. Using a soft-edged brush, I paint over anything that I don’t want the Dust & Scratches filter to touch. When I’m done, I choose Filter, Noise, Dust & Scratches again, make my settings, and click OK this time. The deselected areas retain their highlights, and the dust specks are eliminated everywhere else in the photo.
The nice thing about the Healing Brush is that you can apply it to every intrusive speck or scratch in a picture, one by one, and get rid of all of them while leaving Grandpa’s freckles intact. The annoying thing about the Healing Brush is that you have to apply it to every intrusive speck or scratch in a picture, one by one. Giving a photo a good workover with the Healing Brush can take some time, but the results are almost always worth the investment.
The Healing Brush works much the way the Clone Stamp tool does. You Alt+click to choose a source point and then paint over what you want to get rid of (see Figure 13.12). Photoshop Elements automatically blends the new pixels with the surrounding ones. This works very well for smooth objects and areas with a random pattern, but not so well in areas with a regular pattern, such as a pair of plaid pants.
Did you Know?
If you’re using the Healing Brush near the edge of a contrasting object, you might notice that the color from the contrasting object keeps bleeding into the areas you’re working on. To prevent this, select the area you want to work on, being careful to follow its edges exactly (as I did in Figure 13.12). When you paint with the Healing Brush inside a selection, it copies pixels only from within the selection.
The Healing Brush shares its toolbox slot with its sibling, the Spot Healing Brush. This tool doesn’t require any fussy Alt+clicking; just click it once on whatever you want to delete, and you’re done (see Figure 13.13.). Just be sure that the Size is set to a diameter larger than that of the spot you want to delete so that you can get it all with a single click.
As we all know, life is about compromise, and JPEG images are a perfect example of that fact. To make our image files small enough that we can cram hundreds of them on our cameras and our iPods, we use lossy compression. And that compression alters the images permanently, adding blocky artifacts and halos around objects (see Figure 13.14).
After you’ve saved an image using lossy compression, you can never regain the picture’s original appearance. What you can do when JPEG artifacts become too obvious, however, is to improve matters somewhat using the Reduce Noise filter. Its Remove JPEG Artifact check box focuses on exactly the type of noise caused by JPEG compression, smoothing the hard edges of the blocks that JPEG inserted and blurring halos around object edges.
Reduce Noise is intended to deal with graininess or randomly colored pixels that are caused by taking pictures with inadequate light or using the wrong shutter speed. (We’ll try this function out in Hour 19, “Using the Improvement Filters.”) Lucky for us, it can also fix messiness caused by JPEG compression. To give it a try, choose Filter, Noise, Reduce Noise (see Figure 13.15). First, of course, check the box marked Remove JPEG Artifact. Then you can start experimenting with the other settings:
Figure 13.15. Using the Reduce Noise filter on the image from Figure 13.14 gets rid of most of the compression artifacts.
Strength determines how much noise reduction takes place.
Preserve Details works like a threshold setting to control how much the noise must stand out to be affected. Higher settings protect the details in your pictures, but they’ll leave more noise behind.
Reduce Color Noise removes those odd, random color pixels that sometimes show up in the middle of an otherwise smooth area.
For best results, try out different combinations of Strength and Preserve Details settings. You want to retain the image’s sharp edges while smoothing out any graininess.
This has been a busy hour. We started by looking at basic image cleanup, incorporating techniques you learned earlier—such as cropping—with new methods. You learned how to remove extraneous objects using the Copy and Paste commands to create patches that can cover flaws, and you practiced using the Clone Stamp tool to remove objects. We talked about what causes red eye, how to avoid getting it in the first place, how to remove it automatically, and how to remove it manually. Then you saw how to delete dust and scratches with a filter designed to do just that and how to kill off more dust and scratches, as well as other small flaws, using the Healing Brush and the Spot Healing Brush tools. Finally, you learned how to use the Reduce Noise filter to remove graininess and JPEG compression artifacts from your pictures.
Finish this hour by answering the quiz questions and checking your answers. Then reward yourself with some playtime doing the activities.
Locate a picture of a group of people. Open it in the Editor and use the patch technique and the Clone Stamp tool to remove one of the people from the picture.
Practice the manual technique that you learned in this hour for removing red eye. Can you make your fixes look as good as those done with the Red Eye Removal tool? Can you make them look even better?
Use both the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush to clean up the same image. Compare the two. Which gives better results? How can you improve your results with the Clone Stamp tool?