Removing spot scratches in your treasured photos - 5 Minute Digital Fix
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Digital Wedding Photography in Charleston West Virginia
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Probably one of the most common problems you will be faced withDigital Wedding Photography in Charleston West Virginia
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in doing any type of digital photo restoration work will be to
do with spot scratches on your old photos.
When we first look at those old black and white or early colour
photos they often have small scratch marks and spots on
them from being stored incorrectly.
These small spot scratches are easily perceived by your
eye when you are looking at the photo, detracting from the
overall subject matter.
Here is a very easy quick fix using Adobe Photoshops History
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Our example "before" image on our web-site has numerous
small spot scratches on the old sepia toned photograph.
The basic removal method described here can quickly and
effortlessly bring those scratched photos back to (almost) their
former glory using the History Brush Tool found in
Photoshop.
This basic technique works extremely well for those types of
images that have spot scratches in areas of the photo
that do not contain a lot of detail.
As you can see in our example image on the web-site, the spots
tend to be primarily on the background of the photo, making it
ideal for this correction method.
Step 1
Having opened up the image in Photoshop we will first
apply the Dust and Scratches filter by selecting
Filter->Noise->Dust & Scratches ...
Set the Threshold to between 1 and 4 (I generally
start with 1) and then increase the Radius until
you see the spot scratches disappear.
Our example image on the web-site finally made the largest spot
scratch on the left hand side of the photo disappear at a
Threshold of 3 and Radius of 10.
All well and good but our image is now totally blurred!! Not
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This is where the History Brush tool comes into play.
Step 2
Open up the History Palette by selecting
Window->History if you cannot see the window already open.
We are going to create a "Snapshot" of the current state
of the image in question by clicking on what looks like a little
image of a camera at the bottom of the History
Palette window (see the red arrow on the web-site image).
After clicking you will notice that the History Palette
now shows an extra image icon called "Snapshot 1".
This is a snapshot of the image that includes the effect of
apply the Dust & Scratches Filter in Step 1.
Now click on the little square box to the left of Snapshot 1.
You will see a little "brush" icon appear which is now
telling us that the "Snapshot 1" image will be used as
our "source" when we paint with the History Brush.
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Remember ... this snapshot image actually has none of the
spot scratches on it because we made them disappear by
applying the Dust & Scratches filter in Step 1.
Step 3
Make the original (un-touched) history snapshot active by
clicking on it (in the case of our example image this is
"Restore-Before-Image.jpg").
Select the History Brush from the main toolbar (this has
the same icon as the little "brush" icon that appeared in the
History Palette window).
We are now ready to "paint away" those spot scratches!!
Step 4
I'm going to zoom in on the largest scratch on the left hand
side of the photo to show you how we use the History
Brush.
We selected the History Brush in Step 3.
Select an appropriate brush size and soft edges.
We now need to decide how to apply the brush to the scratches in
question.
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You will notice that the scratches in our example image are
"lighter" than the surrounding image.
Step 5
We need to paint "darker" pixels and as such we set the
History Brush Mode: to "Darken" (Top Menu Bar option when
you have the History Brush as the active tool).
This has the effect of "telling the History Brush" to
only replace pixels on the original image with pixels from our
snapshot if the snapshot pixel is darker.
Start to paint over the scratches and see what happens.
The scratches start to miraculously disappear as you
paint over them.
They are being replaced with the underlying snapshot image
pixels you created in Step 1.
The benefit of using this techniques is that you have complete
control over which parts of the original image you
"paint over" so as not to blur important details
of the image had you just applied a Dust & Scratches
filter to the whole image.
Now what if your scratches are darker than the surrounding
image, I hear you ask?
Easy!! ... just use a History Brush Mode: of "Lighten"
instead of "Darken".
You can experiment with all of the History Brush options -
Mode, Opacity and Flow until you get the desired result.
The resulting "After" image has had all of the spot
scratches removed easily without compromising on the
photographic detail of the image.
And there you have it!! Less than five minutes of digital image
manipulation to remove those unwanted spot scratches.
If you find the steps taking are a little hard to understand in
this text based article, you can click on the link at the end of
this article to see the same method explained on our website
with the aid of example graphical images.
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Digital Wedding Photography in Cheyenne Wyoming
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Gary Wilkinson 2005 - All Rights ReservedDigital Wedding Photography in Cheyenne Wyoming
Every couple in Cheyenne Wyoming wants wonderful photos of their wedding day that get hold of the .....
You can see this removal method complete with example
images at
http://www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com/Basic-Removal-of-Scr
atches-in-Photos.html
Feel free to re-print this article provided that all
hyperlinks and author biography are retained
as-is.
About the author:
Gary Wilkinson is a photographer, photographic restorer
and the owner of a photographic retail business.
He is also the publisher of the
www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com website, where other
methods of correcting common photographic restoration problems
are discussed.