96. Remove Freckles and Minor Blemishes BEFORE YOU BEGIN 80 Zoom In and Out with the Zoom Tool 81 Zoom In and Out with the Overview Palette
SEE ALSO 97 Whiten Teeth 98 Awaken Tired Eyes
Almost everyone has certain ‚ cosmetic distinctions that help identify and even glamorize a person. However, if they're the temporary kind, you might not want a permanent record of them. Sometimes a perfectly good photograph is marred by minor distractions such as a few blemishes, a mole, a cold sore, or a few wrinkles just beginning to show. Is it vain to want to fix nature? Perhaps, but don't let that stop youespecially when it's so easy. You can use the Clone Brush to paint away minor defects in a photograph by copying good pixels from some other area. But the process is tedious and often easily detectable. In this task, you'll use a quicker method. | 1. | Duplicate Background Layer
Open the image you want to repair and then click the Duplicate Layer button on the Layer palette. Name the new layer Unblurred .
| | 2. | Blur Background Layer Change to the Background layer and select Adjust, Blur, Blur More from the menu. TIP To see the blurred Background layer, hide the top layer temporarily by clicking its eye button on the Layer palette. For very large images such as those at 1048x1478 resolution, the Blur More filter might not do enough to blur the layer. In such cases, try the Gaussian Blur filter ( Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur ). 96. Remove Freckles and Minor Blemishes | | 3. | Erase Blemishes
On the Layer palette, change to the Unblurred layer; click the Eraser tool. Adjust the Size value so that the eraser is slightly bigger than the blemish you want to remove. Soften the edge a bit by setting Hardness to 50 and Density to 80. Then click the blemish with the eraser, revealing the blurred layer beneath .
| | 4. | Merge All Layers
After erasing all the minor imperfections, merge the layers into one by choosing Layers, Merge, Merge All (Flatten) .
| | 5. | View the Result
There, that's better. We didn't erase the detail and character of the face, just improved it a bit. Look for this in the Color Gallery section in this book.
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