Chapter 6. Fixing and Retouching Photos

How often have you thumbed through photo albums and found images you'd wished were better composed or lit more evenly? Or maybe you've sorted through shoeboxes from the attic, disappointed that time and age have taken their toll on those wonderful old photographs of your dad in his high school band uniform and your grandparents honeymooning at the lake. Until recently, there was no simple way to correct or repair photographs regardless of whether they were out of focus, water damaged, or poorly composed.

Happily, things have changed. Now, armed with little more than a desktop scanner and Photoshop Elements, anyone can retouch and restore old photographs. In this chapter, you learn not only how to straighten and crop a crooked scan, but how to repair a damaged photo, enhance focus and image detail, and even eliminate that troublesome red-eye effect. Although these topics are presented primarily in the context of fixing and correcting older, scanned photographs, the techniques presented here work equally well when retouching images captured with a digital camera.