Last hour, we worked on some black-and-white pictures that needed help. This hour, we’ll do the same with color pictures. In Photoshop, you can adjust the colors to restore a picture that’s faded with age or that has too much red, green, or some other color in it. You can compensate for slight-to-moderate underexposure or overexposure. You can take the red out of a person’s eyes or the unearthly green out of a cat’s eyes. You can even create scenes that never were by adding objects from other images and by modifying what’s there. Don’t like the blue shirt you were wearing in that photo? No problem—you can make it green, or pink, or whatever other color you like.
The pictures we retouched in the last hour were old black-and-white photos. In this hour, you’ll find that you can use most of the same tricks and techniques in retouching color images. You might even find that color retouching is easier than working in black-and-white because the color tends to help disguise both the image’s flaws and your manipulation.
Figure 22.1 is a picture that was taken sometime in the mid-1970s. I don’t know what happened to it. Perhaps it was left in the sun—it was taken in south Florida, after all. Maybe it wasn’t processed right in the first place. It was way too light to start with, and as you can see by looking at the “green” grass, it’s got a decidedly pink tint. Whatever the cause of the picture’s problems, I’d like to try fixing them. Feel free to download the picture from the Sams website and work along. It’s called swingset.jpg.
Apply a Simple Color Correction to a Photo
First, look at the Histogram panel, shown in Figure 22.2; I’ve used the panel menu to switch to All Channels view, turn off Statistics, and show the channels in color. You can immediately see that all three channels don’t have much going on at the dark end of the graph; this is confirmed by looking at the composite image, which is obviously overexposed, making it very light. Now, you can also see from the picture that nothing in it, aside from the tire swing, should be particularly dark. But the midtones can definitely use some help.
We could try working with Levels to fix this problem, but Levels won’t enable us to darken the blown-out white areas of the image. Curves, however, can do just that (see Figure 22.3), and it can fix the color cast. To adjust the image with the Curves dialog, follow these steps:
With the image open, open the Curves dialog (choose Image, Adjustments, Curves).
Drag the white point at the top of the curve straight down to darken the image’s highlights. Watch the walls of the white houses in the background to gauge the effect of your changes; you don’t want to turn them gray, just keep them from being quite so blinding.
Next, drag the entire curve’s middle downward to darken all the midtones. That improves the picture’s contrast quite a bit—now you can see what’s happening.
Now choose the color that needs adjusting from the pop-up Channels menu. Choose Red, Green, or Blue if those colors need lessening. If you decide the problem is with cyan, magenta, or yellow, consider the color wheel and choose the complementary color, then increase it. If there’s too much yellow, add blue. If there’s too much magenta, add green. If there’s too much cyan, add red. In this case, we obviously need to increase magenta. But there’s no magenta curve, so we’ll choose Green instead and increase it.
Drag the curve up to increase the amount of the color or down to decrease the amount. Watch the preview as you drag, and click OK when the colors look right (see Figure 22.3).
This photo needs some additional tweaking to increase the saturation now that we’ve taken out the excess color. It also needs cropping, additional brightness and contrast adjustment, and some spot removal. The final picture, shown in Figure 22.4, is a big improvement.
We’ve all seen red eye before. It’s not a problem in black-and-white photos, but it shows up much more often than most of us would like in color pictures of people and animals taken with a flash camera. It’s caused by the flash reflecting off the blood vessels at the back of the eye, which lays an eerie red glow over the pupils of anyone looking straight at the flash. You’ll often see a similar phenomenon called green eye in photos of animals, which is also caused by the flash reflecting off the back of the eye. You can avoid both green eye and red eye if you make sure that your portrait subject, human or otherwise, isn’t looking directly at the flash as you’re shooting. Also make sure that there’s plenty of light in the room so that the subject’s pupils have contracted to as small a size as possible. That’s what the preflash feature on many cameras attempts to do, as well—force the pupil to contract before the picture is taken.
You may think red eye is easily fixed these days with a quick application of the Red Eye tool, but this magic solution doesn’t work in all cases. For one thing, it doesn’t work when the red eye isn’t actually red. Figure 22.5 shows a line of hounds suffering from serious green eye. This one was shot in a dim room, and the flash caught all of the dogs staring wide-eyed. If we correct the off-color eyes, it will be an interesting picture. But the Red Eye tool works only with actual red eyes, so we’ll have to step in with a manual repair to fix these.
Correct Green Eye
You’ll find that this correction is actually quite easy; download inline.jpg from the book’s website if you want to use the same image I show here. Here’s how to do it:
Open the image and zoom in on the eyes by clicking the Zoom tool in the image window. I’ll start with the dog at the front of the line, a good friend of mine named Gunner.
Use the Quick Selection tool to select the parts that need to be corrected, and then choose Select, Refine Edge and adjust as necessary to make sure the entire problem area is included in the selection (see Figure 22.6).
Choose the Paint Bucket tool. Set the Foreground color to black or to a dark color from the image—I’m using a chocolate brown because that’s the right color for a greyhound’s eyes. On the Options bar, set the blending mode to Darken with an Opacity no greater than about 80%. This setting darkens the eye while maintaining the detail; using the Normal blending mode would obscure any highlights Photoshop is able to pull out of the eye.
Drop the paint into the selections. If you want to accent the highlights more, use a single-pixel pencil and touch up with white or a light color as needed.
Press Command-H (Mac) or Ctrl+H (Windows) to hide the selection so that you can evaluate the effect of the change. Figure 22.7 shows how Gunner looks with his eyes brown again.
The semi-opaque brown that we poured in effectively darkened the pupils without losing detail. You can use this technique any time you want to change the color drastically in a small area of an image. Be careful not to select any part of the image that you don’t want to change; to be on the safe side, create a new layer and fill the selection on that layer so that you can clean it up, if needed.
If the method we just used to fix Gunner’s eyes doesn’t appeal to you, you’ll be glad to know that Photoshop includes a tool created expressly for fixing small spots that need a quick color change. The Color Replacement tool uses the Foreground color selectively to paint over just the color you want to replace. It’s quicker than using the previous method, but it might not give as good results with eyes that should be darker (because it doesn’t change luminosity), and it can leave a light ring around the edge of the area you’re working on. If you find a red (or green, for animals) ring around your corrected eye, you can adjust the Color Replacement tool’s tolerance upward so that more of the color will be replaced. Figure 22.8 shows the tool in use, correcting another greyhound’s eyes.
Editing a picture to improve the composition is entirely reasonable, if it’s a picture for your own use. Quite different standards apply to photos intended for publication, as the venerable National Geographic magazine found out back in 1982. The magazine published an article on Egypt and sent a photographer to get pictures of the country’s famous pyramids for a cover photo. After studying the pictures, the art director decided that the composition would be better if he moved one of the pyramids closer to its neighbor. Bad idea! As soon as the issue was published, readers who’d been to Egypt and seen the pyramids at Giza in a distinctly different configuration began calling and writing to the magazine in droves to complain.
The editors apologized for their deceptive image in the following issue, but the incident sparked a raging debate on the nature of authenticity. Now, it seemed, it was impossible to trust that any photo in National Geographic was genuine. The question has been argued ever since. How much change is okay? How much is too much? Are the rules different for magazines and for newspapers? What about feature articles versus hard news?
It’s clear that you can’t always believe what you see—that has been the case practically since photography was invented. When we see supermarket tabloids featuring pictures that stretch the bounds of believability, however, we’re usually aware that we’re not looking at the real thing. Remember the one of the president shaking hands with the space alien? And if a magazine cover model is having a bad hair day or her face breaks out, retouching is considered perfectly reasonable. Where do you draw the line?
My own answer depends on how the picture is to be used. I’ve created some pretty wacky composite images myself (see Figure 22.9), but reputable newspapers and magazines have strict guidelines about what they’ll allow for photo manipulation these days. I think that’s a good thing. The general rule tends to be that, if a change affects the content of the photo instead of its appearance, you can’t do it. You can lighten a too-dark picture of a politician, but you can’t change the soda can in his hand into a beer can (or vice versa).
Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College, has put together a great collection of altered photos on his website (www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering). It shows the National Geographic image and dozens of others, as old as the dawn of photography and as recent as last month, most of them side-by-side with the original, undoctored photos. I highly recommend spending some time checking out Dr. Farid’s gallery if you’re interested in just how far photo manipulation has come since the early days.
Some photos are almost perfect, except for one annoying flaw. Quite frequently, it’s power lines running across the sky, and you’ll also see litter on the ground in a photo that you never noticed at the time (see Figure 22.10). When the area directly next to the troublesome spot is essentially the same as another part of the image, you can get rid of the clutter by simply lassoing a piece of sky or street or whatever matches and dragging it to cover the offending objects. This technique works well when you have things like power lines or cell phone antennae sticking into the sky, because the uncomplicated background makes it easy to blend the patch with its new location.
Here’s a photo of a cathedral in Baltimore, Maryland. I like the picture, but I don’t like that streetlight poking the cathedral’s spire on the left.
Retouch a Photo with the Patch Tool
To use the Patch tool to cover up an unsightly object in one of your own photos, follow these steps:
Switch to the Patch tool and make sure that the Source button is clicked on the Tool Options bar.
Select the area you want to patch over by circling it with the Patch tool. Remember, the Patch tool works just like the Lasso tool for this task.
With the selection marquee active, click the selection and drag it to an area of the image that matches the selected area pretty well. (See a close view of this in Figure 22.11.) The match doesn’t have to be perfect; Photoshop will blend the patch in with its surroundings.
Repeat as needed to hide any other parts of the picture that you don’t want.
Having read the sidebar earlier in this hour on altering photos, you now know that the techniques you’re learning in this hour should never be used on a news photo. But if you’re just playing around for your own amusement, don’t worry—the Authenticity Police aren’t going to show up on your doorstep.
Sometimes you have to remove more than a scratch or a small imperfection from a photo. Sometimes you have to take out a much larger area of the image to save a potentially good picture. Figure 22.12 shows just such a photo. My aunt sent me this in hopes that I could remove the hideously distracting curtain in the background. There’s a copy at the book’s website, so you can work along. It’s called family.jpg.
Tip: Another Way to Patch
We just used the Patch tool in Source mode, which works as just described. If you switch to Destination mode, on the other hand, the area you select with the Patch tool becomes the patch, and you drop it over the area to which you drag it, rather than vice versa. Use Destination if the patch itself is the important part of the image. For example, say you want to drop Johnny Depp’s face over your cousin’s face in a family portrait. First, select Johnny in his image with the Patch tool and then drag him right where you want him in the family image. If your goal is simply to cover up something and you’re less concerned with what you cover it with, stick with Source mode.
Remove Unwanted Items
The first step in rescuing any photo is to determine whether it needs cropping or color correction. This one is cropped as well as it’s going to be—it’s a shame that the little girl on the right is cut off—but its colors are very dull. Adjusting using the Variations dialog box lets you add cyan and magenta, and a quick Levels adjustment improves the image’s contrast. Now you can move on to a trickier fix.
Let’s replace the curtain and the wall next to it with a plain-colored background that matches the wall’s original color. I’ll work on a new layer first and paint the new background color on it. I’ve used the Eyedropper to pick up the color of the wall at the upper-right corner of the photo and just sprayed it on the new layer over the curtain, not worrying a lot about the edges. Figure 22.13 shows what the image looks like now.
Now comes the fun part. You have to swap the position of the two layers, which will temporarily hide the new wall background. Double-click the Background layer, which is the original photo of the five kids. Rename it whatever you want to call it (Layer 0, the default name, is fine in this case). Then, on the Layers panel, drag it above the layer you created in step 1. See Figure 22.14.
All you have to do now is remove the curtain and wall bit by bit, thus revealing the background you’ve created. You can do this in a variety of ways: by using the regular Eraser tool (very carefully), by selecting and deleting successive areas of the image, or by using the Background Eraser. I opted to start by simply using the Eraser tool to delete most of the nasty curtain, but the image still needs a lot of work around the edges of the kids’ heads with the Background Eraser. See Figure 22.15.
Whew! I’ve removed the awful curtain and the almost-as-awful wallpaper. Now is a good time to do any last-minute color adjustments. I applied the Despeckle filter to remove the dust from the scanner glass. Finally, because the painted wall looked so flat, I used the Texturizer filter to restore a surface similar to that of the original wallpaper. Figure 22.16 shows the final photo, ready for a frame.
Rats! You thought you had a great shot—and indeed it was, but someone or something crept into the frame that really shouldn’t be there. Sometimes you realize it right away, but the moment has passed; other times, you don’t notice the trespasser until you offload the pictures from your camera. Well, whoever or whatever it is, you can usually get it out of the picture much more easily with Photoshop than in real life. Figure 22.17 was shot at a children’s museum. There’s an intrusive unidentified wooden object sticking into the frame from the right, and the boy’s shirt is too close in color to the wall; he’s not standing out from the background enough.
I’m going to remove the wooden object and turn the boy’s shirt into a nice bright blue, which he says he likes better anyway. The first step is to use the Clone Stamp tool to get rid of that thing on the right. Clicking along the molding closer to the boy, I clone that area right on top of the wood thing, using the overlay to align the molding section perfectly with the molding to the left of it (see Figure 22.18).
This next piece is even easier. Using the Quick Selection tool, I selected the red shirt and then used Hue/Saturation (choose Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation) with the Colorize box checked to make it blue. I darkened it a bit and bumped up the Saturation level until I achieved the blue I wanted. All done (see Figure 22.19)!
The fixes required took only a couple minutes, and they definitely improved the picture. This kind of “candid” photo almost always has something in it that you wish wasn’t there. Now, thanks to the magic of Photoshop, you can make all of your pictures perfect with just a few minutes of work.
Color repair isn’t terribly different from black-and-white photo repair, except that you need to be more aware of the image’s colors and you can make much more use of blending modes. Off-color photos can be fixed with Photoshop’s regular color adjustment tools, which we gave a thorough workout in Hour 5, “Adjusting Brightness and Color.” Retouching to get rid of obvious flaws and red or green eye is best accomplished with Photoshop’s special tools and with the image enlarged so that you can see what you’re doing. Use layers to protect the original image while you’re working, and merge the changes with the Background layer only when you are completely satisfied with the results.
Find some of your own photo portraits that have bad red eye. If they’re printed photos, scan them into the computer. Then use the tricks you’ve learned to restore normal eye colors. It’s okay to try the Red Eye Removal tool, but if it doesn’t work, give the other techniques we’ve talked about a whirl. Next, find a group photo. Take a look at some modified photos online first to inspire you; then pretend you’re a disgruntled political leader and remove one member of the group.