Cleaning Up a Picture, Step by Step

As you can see in Figure 21.13, this picture has been ripped, faded, badly scratched, and generally beaten up. We'll go through this one step by step so that you can see exactly what happens at each stage. You can download this one from the website mentioned in the Introduction and follow along. It's called brothers.jpg .

Figure 21.13. This will take some work. (Photo courtesy of Suzanne Hecker.)

Try it Yourself

Restore a Badly Damaged Photo

To make this picture, or any other, look like new:

1.	Crop the image to remove the border, if there is one, and any unnecessary parts of the image. (Anything you remove doesn't have to be retouched.) Select the Crop tool from the toolbox. Drag it across the picture, holding down the mouse button. Use the handles on the cropping outline to fine-tune the selection, and then double-click inside the window to crop the image.
2.	Set the mode to Grayscale (Image Mode Grayscale) to remove the colored stains and the brown tones.
3.	Open the Histogram palette. Look at the histogram to see what needs to be done to equalize the contrast (see Figure 21.14). In this case, both the white and dark points need to be reset. To make these changes, you'll need to adjust the levels. Figure 21.14. The histogram shows a lot of middle points and not many very light or dark ones.
4.	Open the Levels dialog box (Image Adjustments Levels) and adjust the levels by dragging the dark slider to the right until its under the beginning of the dark peak of the histogram. Drag the white slider to the left until it's under the beginning of the white peak. Figure 21.15 shows these adjustments. Figure 21.15. Adjusting the levels improves the contrast.
5.	Now try the Dust & Scratches filter (Filters Noise Dust & Scratches). In this case, it seems that the harm it does outweighs the improvement. In removing the dust, it removes too much detail, even at a low setting. (Figure 21.16 shows the filter applied.) Click OK to apply the filter or Cancel if you dont want to use it. Figure 21.16. Removing dust can also remove detail. In the Background If the image you're working on has a clearly delineated foreground figure and a smooth or blurry background, try selecting just the background and then running the Dust & Scratches filter. Any blurring the filter does won't matter as much on the background, and you'll save yourself a lot of picky clean-up work.
6.	Because the Dust & Scratches filter didn't do what we wanted it to do, you'll have to remove the scratches by hand. Let's use the Healing Brush to cover them, starting with the background because it's a good place to practice with this tool. Select the Healing Brush and open the Brushes palette. Choose a soft-edged brush. Choose Source: Sampled and make sure Aligned isn't checked. Pick the dark tone adjacent to the scratch, and start stamping it out. Remember to set a spot to use as a source, by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) while you click the mouse on the spot you want to copy. For small spots located far from object edges, try using the Spot Healing Brush with a small, hard-edged brush selection. Figure 21.17 shows the partially treated photo. Remember to change your source selection as the areas the damage runs through change value. Figure 21.17. Obviously, I am working from the top down.
7.	The best way to remove the scratches across the faces is to use the Brush tool and repaint each face, rather than trying to stamp them. To make the task easier, enlarge the picture to at least 200%. Switch to the Zoom tool at the bottom of the toolbox and click it in the image window to enlarge the picture.
8.	Select the Eyedropper tool and click the closest gray adjacent to the scratch. Choose a small brush and paint over the scratches, changing shades of gray with the Eyedropper as needed. Figure 21.18 shows before and after views of this step. Figure 21.18. Be careful not to apply paint too evenly.
9.	At the same time, you can use a combination of the Spot Healing Brush and the Smudge tool to remove any light spots and to blend small gaps in the image.
10.	Next, apply the Dodge and Burn tools as needed to bring out details. Dodging lightens the image, and burning darkens it. Sponging, the third tool in that toolbox compartment , increases or decreases the saturation of colors. Select the Dodge tool and set its exposure to 25% so that the effect will be gradual. Figure 21.19 shows the progress to this point. Figure 21.19. It's looking better.
11.	Now all that's left to do is to try a little Unsharp Masking, or possibly a small amount of Gaussian Blur. Compare Figure 21.20 with the original photo. It's not perfect. It's still a very grainy photo, but it's not scratched and torn anymore. Figure 21.20. Maybe not as good as new, but darned close.

Toggle Trick

When you're applying filters such as Dust & Scratches, you can quickly toggle the filter preview on and off by clicking in the preview area. When the mouse button is down, the filter effects aren't shown in the preview area. This lets you judge the effect.