Retouching: Fine-Tuning Images - Photoshop Elements 13: The Missing Manual - page 473

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 clon-
ing 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 working on a photo like this, be sure to check
out the Restore Old Photo Guided Edit, which gathers together most of the tools you need for this
type of work and suggests an order in which to use them. And if you're really interested in restoring
old photos, check out Katrin Eismann's books on the subject (Photoshop Restoration & Retouching
[New Riders, 2006] is a good place to start). They cover full-featured Photoshop, but you can ad-
apt most of the techniques for Elements.
Elements gives you five 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, one of the most popular features Elements has borrowed from
Photoshop (although Elements' version is much more limited; see The Spot Healing
Brush ) . 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. Coverage of this tool
starts on The Spot Healing Brush .
▪ The Healing Brush works much like the Spot Healing Brush, only you get to 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 usually better at fixing large areas than the Spot Healing Brush, be-
cause you don't have to worry about inadvertently dragging in unwanted details (which
can happen with the Spot Healing Brush). This tool is described in detail starting on The
Healing Brush .
▪ The Clone Stamp works like the Healing Brush in that you sample a good area and ap-
ply it to the spot you want to fix. But instead of blending in the repair, the Clone Stamp
simply covers the bad area with the replacement. This tool, which you'll learn how to use
starting on The Clone Stamp , 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). Depending on the conditions in
your photo, the Clone Stamp may also be your best option for creating a realistic copy of
details that are elsewhere in a photo. For example, you might use this tool to clone some