My sister thinks that I really know what I'm doing. All I really know is the right the right button to press. Read this email from her today:
"Any chance you would help me fix this picture of Austin? He has a little scrape on his nose that I want taken out of the picture and you are way better at photo shop than I am."
She was right away the scrape on his nose, although it looks more like someone threw a strawberry at it. And I guess she was right about the Photoshop part, except for the fact that I did not have to know a whole lot about Photoshop to easily fix the image. I just had to know about the availability of the Spot Healing Brush Tool and how to use it.
With her permission, here is a close-up of my nephew's nose:
Here's how I fixed it.
- As I taught in the recent "Digital Images: Scanning, Digitizing, Editing, and Preserving" webinar, before making any edits to an original (especially if the original is in the JPG format), first make a copy of the original. I did this in Photoshop Elements by going to File > Duplicate. Now any changes I make will not harm the original.
- After zooming in on the nose, I clicked on the Spot Healing Brush Tool and enlarge its brush size to about 35px.
- Then I clicked and held the left mouse button down and highlighted the scraped area. When I let go of the button, the picture had pretty much fixed itself.
- Save the new image at File > Save As.
It took less than a minute from beginning to the end, but I guess sometimes you do need to know a little about what tools are available and how to use them. To see the Spot Healing Brush Tool in action, and for lots of other digital imaging tips, watch the "Digital Images: Scanning, Digitizing, Editing, and Preserving" webinar (107 minutes plus 11 pages of handouts) or click here for the 15-minute preview. Also available in a bundle with "Organizing and Sharing Digital Images" here.
By clicking save as, the original image is retained so the scraped nose picture still exits. I used this feature to edit a womans dress because I really didn’t think people needed to see the top of her nylons. So I modified her dress. Before using photoshop, I alterred a couple of pictures that I included in a published history taking out people who did not belong in family photos. One in particular was a family photo taken at the cemetery the day of my dads funeral. A person who did not belong to Dad’s descendants showed up in the photo. I edited her out, extending a tree to cover her up. Yes this altered the moment, but the photo as is, is much better.