One of the most common problems you’ll run into when working with older pictures is fading or overexposure, either of which results in pictures with little contrast. You’ll also often see shots with too much contrast—deep, dark shadows and blown-out highlights—that can be attributed to inexpensive equipment and supplies and less sophisticated technology than we enjoy these days. Either way, Photoshop Elements offers you ways to attack contrast problems throughout a picture or just in trouble areas.

The picture in Figure 16.5 shows a genuine 1950s-vintage duck whose name was evidently Daffy—at least, that’s what the note on the photo’s back says. At any rate, Daffy could definitely stand out from his background a bit more than he’s currently doing. First, the whole picture needs to lose that muddy gray cast. Then a bit of sharpening will probably do wonders.

Figure 16.5. Daffy seems to be stuck in the mud.

I’ve already cropped this photo to get rid of extraneous elements, such as the people having a picnic to Daffy’s left. We’re interested only in ducks here, after all. My next step is to remove the color from the picture by pressing Ctrl+Shift+U (if you prefer, you can choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color). Then it’s time to see what can be done with the Levels dialog (see Figure 16.6).

Figure 16.6. Here I can brighten the picture by showing the Levels dialog where the whitest area of the image should be.

Here’s a good opportunity to use the eyedroppers because you can see that Daffy’s feathers should be bright white. Here I’ve chosen the white eyedropper and clicked on the front of the duck’s neck to indicate that this should be the brightest area in the picture. Then I’ve dragged the midtone slider to the left a bit to lighten the grass around the duck. Now Daffy looks somewhat faded, but don’t worry—that’s easily corrected with a Brightness/Contrast adjustment. I used these settings: Brightness +2 and Contrast +49. After that, I ran the Despeckle Filter, followed by the Dust & Scratches filter. Then I chose Enhance, Adjust Sharpness and played with those settings until I liked Daffy’s looks (see Figure 16.7). In the Adjust Sharpness dialog, I changed the Remove setting to Lens Blur instead of Gaussian Blur, and I checked the More Refined box to preserve more image detail.

Figure 16.7. With a little of this and a little of that, Daffy is looking a whole lot better.

So far, we’ve been adjusting the entire image. Now it’s time to get more subtle by making use of two tools that you can apply just where they’re needed. Based on two old darkroom tricks, the Dodge and Burn tools can lighten and darken, respectively, wherever you apply them.

The Dodge tool looks like a lollipop, but it’s supposed to look like a circular piece of cardboard on a stick. If you were printing pictures in a darkroom, you could wave this tool between the light on the enlarger and the photo paper to tone down the image in selected areas. In Photoshop Elements, you use it the same way: by dragging the Dodge tool over a dark area of the image to lighten it. In the Options bar, you can choose the brush size and shape that the Dodge tool uses, as well as whether it focuses on highlights, midtones, or shadows. You can also determine how much effect it has with each click.

Similarly, in a darkroom, you use your hand to focus extra light on part of your picture so the image there burns in darker than the rest of the picture. Photoshop Elements’ version of this technique involves using the Burn tool, whose icon looks like a person’s fist held so that the fingers form a hole though which light can shine. Like the Dodge tool, the Burn tool can operate on highlights, midtones, or shadows, one at a time but not all at once; its Exposure percentage determines whether each stroke of the tool darkens the underlying pixels a little or a lot.

In the next Try it Yourself, you’ll use the Dodge and Burn tools to fix a couple common problems encountered with indoor flash photography.

Sometimes the simplest techniques are the best. In this case, I’m referring to simply painting over stuff you don’t like. It works when you’re painting your walls; why not in Photoshop Elements?

In smooth areas with little color variation, painting over flaws usually is quicker and easier than messing around with patches, the Healing Brush, or the Clone Stamp. First, set the tip of your brush so it’s slightly larger than the object you want to paint over, and then set the right Foreground color. You’ll need to pay careful attention to the values in the color picker, and you’ll probably need to try a dozen or so times before you get it just right. Or, if you prefer to use a foolproof method of choosing precisely the right color, you can press Alt to temporarily turn the Paintbrush tool into the Eyedropper tool and click it in the picture near the spot you want to paint out. If only matching paint colors in your house were this easy....

When you’re painting, you’ll get the best results with quick clicks instead of sweeping strokes of the brush. You might want to try varying the Paintbrush’s opacity, using the slider in the Options bar, to ensure that your touch-ups remain subtle (see Figure 16.10).

Figure 16.10. We can easily deal with these spots on the wall next to our old friend Figaro using a soft-edged Paintbrush.

The first thing to do with this photo is get rid of the color. The photo itself was originally black and white, but it has yellowed, and the cardboard frame is brown and silver, with some odd blue streaks. Away with it all, I say. If I want to add a tint when I’m done, that’s easy enough, but for now, the color is just a distraction from the “bones” of the picture. This would also be the case if I were dealing with a sepia-tinted photo; retouching is much simpler if you have to match only brightness instead of an exact hue.

As you know, you can remove the color from a picture in three simply ways. You can choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color, which is the quickest method but offers no control over how the conversion from color to black and white is done. Or you can open the Hue/Saturation dialog (choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Hue/Saturation), where you can drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left and then adjust the Lightness slider as well. For the most control, you need to use the Convert to Black and White command, found in the Enhance menu. That’s my solution for this photo, using the Portraits preset to get the smoothest result on the face (see Figure 16.12).

Figure 16.12. The Newspaper setting made the picture too light; the landscape settings made it too dark. Portraits is just right.

The next steps in working on this picture will sound familiar: First, crop out the parts you don’t need. Then adjust the picture’s brightness, if needed. In this case, I definitely want to get rid of that frame. The scan is crooked, so I can take this opportunity to straighten the photo while cropping it. Using the Crop tool, I can carefully crop out as much of the frame as possible without losing any of the photo. Clicking outside the cropping marquee, I can rotate the marquee so that it lines up with the photo (see Figure 16.13); when I accept the crop, the photo rotates back the other way to become level.

Figure 16.13. Always take the opportunity to straighten an image while you’re cropping it, if needed.

Speaking of “level,” that’s the next thing I want to do to this photo: adjust its levels. Bring the black-and-white sliders to where the Levels graph begins to trend upward, to brighten the photo without making it too light.

Now it’s time for the real work on this picture to begin. First, I grab the Spot Healing Brush and adjust the brush size. Then I click it on any little specks that stand out, unless they’re right next to an area of another color. In that case, the Spot Healing Brush pulls out some of the other color to make its instant patch, and I’d end up with a smudge instead of a speck, which isn’t really an improvement. I can use this technique all over the picture, but my primary concern is the face; I can always blur the background or replace it entirely, but the face is the part of the picture I most want to preserve (see Figure 16.14). If I don’t like the results of any click, I can click Undo right away to get rid of that bit of healing and then either try again with a different brush size or leave the spot for later removal with the Clone Stamp or Healing Brush.

Figure 16.14. Zoom way, way in, if you need to, and don’t be afraid to adjust the size of the Spot Healing Brush as you work, using the menu in the Options bar.

Those are the tools I pull out of my bag next. For the fold marks across the eyebrows and under the left eye, I need to paint a large area instead of just clicking here and there. The Healing Brush can do most of the work, but sometimes it pulls in incorrect colors as it blends the edges of your strokes with the background. When I need to control exactly where each new pixel is coming from, I switch to the Clone Stamp. Using these tools, I can get rid of the fold marks and cracks without covering up any tiny details of the photo itself.

I can also use the Clone Stamp to cover up the remaining edges of the frame. This is fairly simple in areas where the frame is adjacent to the light background, but it’s trickier at the top of the hat and around the U.S. flag in the upper-left corner of the picture. Finally, the Blur tool and the Dodge and Burn tools stand in for modern makeup. I blurred the skin on the face to smooth out the film noise and other marks—whenever you do this, be sure you don’t blur out the shadows that give the face its shape. I dodged the areas under both eyes and burned the whites of the eyes a bit to make them pop more. The final result is shown in Figure 16.15.

Figure 16.15. This version of the photo is a lot more presentable than the original scan.

Cleaning Up a Picture, Step by Step

Eventually, all this becomes routine, but before that can happen, you need to work through the whole repair process a few times. To give you some practice with these techniques, download the picture shown in Figure 16.16 from the book’s website (it’s called picnic.jpg) and take a look. This image is pretty typical of photos from the 1940s, with some odd horizontal light streaks and the beginnings of discoloration at the bottom. To fix it, follow these steps:

Figure 16.16. This is a nice candid shot that we can make even nicer.

1. First, use the Straighten tool to draw a horizontal line across the top of the car. Make it as long as possible so you can maximize its accuracy. When you release the mouse, the picture is level for the first time ever.

2. Next, grab the Crop tool and get rid of the photo’s borders. This step also removes most of the writing at the bottom of the picture, saving you the trouble of retouching it—nice, huh?

3. Choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color. Yes, you could mess around with Convert to Black and White, but because of this photo’s inconsistent brightness, you’ll have to fix one part of the image, no matter what technique you use. That means quick-and-dirty is the way to go.

4. Now choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Adjust Shadows/Highlights. Here’s the magic pill for this picture’s inconsistent lightness—too light at the top and too dark at the bottom. Start by backing off the initial automatic Lighten Shadows adjustment, from 25% to about 17%. Then drag the Darken Highlights slider to a setting of 35% or so, and increase Midtone Contrast by 35% as well.

   Did you Know?

   Before clicking OK in the Shadows/Highlights dialog, uncheck the Preview box and then recheck it once or twice to see what a huge change these settings make in the picture.

5. Now it’s time to retouch. First, take a good look at the picture and decide what you want to fix and what you want to leave alone. In this case, I’d get rid of the horizontal light streaks and the remains of the writing at the bottom; I’d leave pretty much everything else alone. There are no other obvious physical flaws to get rid of, other than perhaps a few specks that are good candidates for the Spot Healing Brush. When you have a plan in mind, use the Clone Stamp and Healing Brush to execute it.

6. Although you fixed most of the lighting issues with your Shadows/Highlights adjustment, there’s still a bit more shadow on the face of the guy on the left than I’d like. Use the Dodge tool set at Shadows and 20% to lighten that shadow some. Don’t lighten it too much!

   Did you Know?

   My personal rule when using the Dodge tool is to stop right before I think the area looks perfect. Invariably, if I take that last step, I end up going too far.

7. Finally, use the Reduce Noise filter, with Remove JPEG Artifact checked, to get rid of the some of the picture’s graininess. Then choose Enhance, Adjust Sharpness and add just a little sharpening; I used an Amount setting of 22%, with a 3.8-pixel radius. And there you go (see Figure 16.17).

   

   Figure 16.17. Now when you look at this picture, you focus on the people in it first instead of the streaks and fading it contains.

Originally, vignetting was intended to compensate for the poor quality of camera lenses in the early days of photography. Because objects around the edges of an image tended to become distorted, the simplest fix was just to blur them out, leaving only a soft-edged oval area for the picture. Of course, vignetting was sold, then as now, as a fancy special effect instead of as camouflage. Hey, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, right? And, in truth, vignetting is a nice way to really zero in on the subject’s face in a portrait, eliminating all distractions.

Creating a vignette is simple, but it used to require a great deal of experimentation before you came up with the right settings for your particular image. That’s no longer the case because now we have the Refine Edge command. Let me explain.

To make a vignette, first draw a selection (generally elliptical) centered on the most important area of the picture. Now you need to soften the selection’s edges, a process that used to involve a series of guesses at what feathering radius would produce the desired result. Now you can see what’s going to happen right in the Refine Edge dialog, so there shouldn’t be much backing and forthing. Choose Select, Refine Edge and make sure the Preview box is checked.

Now, before you start messing with the settings, double-click the right preview button, the one with the red tint (see Figure 16.18), and click the red swatch to open the color picker. Change the Color to white, with 100% Opacity. Now the overlay that Photoshop Elements uses to indicate the unselected areas of the image is paper-colored and gives an almost perfect indicator of how your vignette will look, so you can go about trying different settings. Ignore the Smooth slider—your selection should already be perfectly smooth—and stay away from the Contract/Expand slider. Although it would be nice to be able to adjust the selection’s size using Contract/Expand, doing so results in a harder edge for the vignette, so that’s no good.

Figure 16.18. Make sure you set both the overlay’s color and its opacity; with the default Opacity setting of 50%, you won’t see an accurate preview.

When you have the Feather setting the way you want it, click OK. Then invert the selection (choose Select, Inverse) so that the area that wasn’t selected before is now—namely the outer edges of the picture (see Figure 16.19). Press Delete to remove the outer edges of the picture, which creates the vignette. If you don’t like what you see, click Undo or press Ctrl+Z three times (which will undo the deletion, the Inverse command, and the Refine Edge command) and go back to the Refine Edge dialog to try some different settings.

Figure 16.19. The vignette effect really focuses attention on the subject’s smile in this portrait.

Just because you removed all of a photo’s color in the process of repairing it doesn’t mean it has to stay plain old black-and-white forever. Adding a tint is a quick way to increase a photo’s appeal. You can use sepia, for an instant antique effect, or you can choose another color that appeals to you.

The easiest way to tint a photo is to use the Variations command. Choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Color Variations (see Figure 16.20). Drag the Amount slider to the left, to cut down on the amount of change you get with each click; then choose an option, such as Increase Red. Stick with just one click at a time and click OK. You can always go back and add more color if the effect is too subtle.

Figure 16.20. You can vary the amount of tinting each click applies with the Amount slider.

Another way to apply a tint gives you a result closer to a traditional duotone. That’s a printing technique in which two inks are used, one colored and one black (usually), so that just the photo’s details are delicately colored. Follow these steps to apply a faux duotone effect: