Color Retouching

Color Retouching

So far, all the pictures we've worked on are old, black-and-white photos. You can use most of the same tools and tricks in color. You might find that color retouching is even easier than working in black-and-white. The color tends to disguise some of the manipulation.

Figure 22.1 is a picture that was taken sometime in the late 1960s. I don't know what happened to it. Perhaps it was left on a radiator or in the sun. Maybe it wasn't processed right. It was dark to start with and as you can see in the supposedly white edge, it's turned yellow. Feel free to download the picture from the Sams website and work along. It's called momanddog.jpg .

Figure 22.1. This picture turned yellow with age.

Try it Yourself

Apply a Simple Color Correction to a Photo

First, look at the Channels palette, shown in Figure 22.2. You can immediately see that the darkest channel is the blue one. In this case, that means that there's not enough blue in the image. We also know that there's too much yellow. The good news is that there's good detail on all three channels, suggesting that we should be able to balance the colors and save the photo.

Figure 22.2. We need to balance the red and blue.

Using the Curves dialog box, as shown in Figure 22.3, I can lower the curve of the green channel to remove most of the unwanted color. Rather than trying to remove it all, which would take away the flesh tones, it's better to compromise. To adjust a single color with the Curves window, follow these steps:

1.	With the image open, open the Curves window (choose Image Adjustments Curves).
2.	Choose the color that needs adjusting from the pop-up Channels menu. Choose Red, Green, or Blue if those colors need lessening. If you decide the problem is with cyan, magenta, or yellow, consider the color wheel, and work with the complementary color. If there's too much yellow, add blue. If there's too much magenta , add green. If there's too much cyan, add red. In this case, we obviously need to decrease both yellow and blue. But there's no yellow curve, so we decrease the green instead.
3.	Drag the curve up to increase the amount of the color. Drag it down to decrease the amount by adding the complement. Watch the preview as you drag. Click OK when the colors look right (see Figure 22.3).

Figure 22.3. After correcting the green, you can also adjust the red and blue if necessary.

This photo needs some additional tweaking to increase the saturation now that we've taken out the excess color. It also needs cropping and some brightness and contrast adjustment, and some spot removal. Be sure to see the final picture in the color section. It's a big improvement.

Fixing Red Eye

You've seen red eye. It's not a problem in black-and-white photos that you colorize, but it's often a problem in color pictures of people and animals taken with a flash camera.

Basically what happens is that the flash reflects off the blood vessels at the back of the eye and puts an eerie, red glow into the pupils of anyone looking straight at the flash. Some animals, by the way, can also display a similar phenomenon called green eye , which is caused by the flash reflecting off the back of the eye. You can avoid this if you make sure that your portrait subject, human or otherwise , isn't looking directly at the flash. Also, make sure that there's plenty of light in the room so that the subject's pupils have contracted as small as possible.

You may think red eye is easily fixed these days with a quick application of the Red Eye tool, but this magic solution doesn't work in all cases. Figure 22.4 shows a portrait of a blue-eyed cat suffering from serious red eye. This one was shot in a dark room and the flash caught the cat staring wide-eyed. If we correct the off-color eyes, it will be a nice picture. But the large red area overwhelms the Red Eye toolit doesn't know where to apply its magicso we'll have to step in with a manual repair.

Figure 22.4. Even printed in black-and-white, the eyes look wrong. On the color plate, they're scary!

Try it Yourself

Correct Red Eye

The correction is actually quite easy. Here's how to do it:

1.	Open the image and zoom in on the eyes by clicking the Zoom tool in the image window.
2.	Use the Magic Wand to select the parts that need to be corrected (see Figure 22.5). Figure 22.5. Cat's eye selected at 200% magnification.
3.	Choose the Paint Bucket tool. Set the foreground color to black or to a dark color from the image. On the Options bar, set the blending mode to Darken with an Opacity no greater than about 80%. This setting darkens the eye while maintaining the detail.
4.	Pour the paint carefully into the pupils of the eyes, making sure not to pour it into any white or colored highlights in the pupil. You might need to click different selected parts of the pupil to cover it all. If you accidentally fill one of the highlights, undo. If you want to accent the highlights more, use a single-pixel pencil and touch up as needed.
5.	Press Command+H (Mac) or Control+H (Windows) to hide the selection so that you can evaluate the effect of the change. Figure 22.6 shows the finished cat. Figure 22.6. Highlights in the pupils are called catchlights.

The semi- opaque black that we poured in effectively darkened the pupils without losing detail. You can use this technique any time you have a small area in a picture that needs to have the color changed drastically. Be careful not to select any part of the image that you don't want to change.

The Color Replacement Tool

If the method we just used to fix the cat's eyes doesn't appeal to you, you'll be glad to know that Photoshop includes a tool created expressly for fixing small spots that need a quick color change. The Color Replacement tool uses the foreground color to paint selectively over only the color you choose to replace. It's quicker than using the previous method, but might not give as good results around the edges of the eye. If you find a red ring around your corrected eye, you can adjust the tolerance to a higher setting so more of the color will be replaced . Figure 22.7 shows the tool in use, correcting the same eyes.

Figure 22.7. Which do you think is the better correction, this or Figure 22.6?

How Much Change Is Okay?

Editing a picture to improve the composition is entirely reasonable, if it's a picture for your own use, but this is precisely what got the esteemed National Geographic magazine in trouble some years ago. They were doing a piece on Egypt and sent a photographer to get pictures of the pyramids. The art director studied the pictures and decided the composition would be better if he moved one of the pyramids closer to the next . As soon as the issue was published, astute readers began calling and writing to the magazine to complain. An apology appeared in the following issue, but simply knowing that the manipulation was possible waved a red flag for many people both inside and outside the publishing industry. The question has been debated ever since. How much change is okay? How much is too much?

It's clear that you can't always believe what you see. The supermarket tabloids frequently feature pictures that stretch the bounds of believability. Remember the one of the president shaking hands with the space alien? Or Bigfoot carrying off the scantily clad woman ? (Why was she dressed like that in the snow anyway?) On the other hand, if a model is having a bad hair day or her face breaks out, retouching is required and expected. Where do you draw the line?

The answer depends on how the picture is to be used. Reputable newspapers and magazines tend to have strict guidelines about what they'll allow for photo manipulation. The general rule seems to be that, if a change affects the content of the photo rather than its appearance, you can't do it. You can lighten a too-dark picture of the politician, but you can't change the soda can in his hand into a beer can (or vice versa).

Drag-and-Drop Repairs

Some photos are almost perfect, except for one annoying flaw. Maybe there are power lines running through the sky, or litter on the ground (see Figure 22.8). When the area directly next to the troublesome spot is essentially the same as the rest of the foreground, you can get rid of the clutter by simply lassoing a piece of sky or street or whatever and dragging it to cover the offending objects. This technique works well when you have things like power lines or cell phone antennae sticking into the sky or anything against an uncomplicated background.

Figure 22.8. Nice pier, but too many strings attached.

Here's a photo of a fishing pier in Yarmouth, NS. I like the photo, but I don't like all the wires.

Try it Yourself

Use the Patch Tool to Retouch a Photo

To use the Patch for this purpose:

1.	Select the Patch tool. Make sure Source is selected on the Tool Options bar.
2.	Select the area you want to patch over by circling it with the Patch tool.
3.	With the selection marquee active, drag the selection to an area of the image that would form a good patch. (See a close view of this in Figure 22.9.) Figure 22.9. Be sure to cover all of the area.
4.	Repeat as needed. You can also use this trick to hide any other parts of the picture that you don't want.

Another Way to Patch

You may have noticed that the Patch Tool Options bar offers you a choice of Source or Destination settings. The Source option works as just described. If you switch to Destination, the area you select with the Patch tool is dropped over the area to which you drag it, rather than vice versa. Use Destination if you have a good idea what area of the image you want to use as a patch. For example, if you want to drop Antonio Banderas's face over your cousin's face in a family portrait, select Antonio with the Patch tool and drag him right where you want him. If your goal is simply to cover something up, and you're less concerned with what you cover it with, use Source mode.

Editing a Picture

There are times when you have to remove more than a scratch or a small imperfection from a photo. Sometimes you have to take out larger objects to save a potentially good picture. Figure 22.10 shows just such a photo. A friend sent me this in hopes that I could remove the distracting background. There's a copy at the book's website so you can work along. It's called family.jpg .

Figure 22.10. That background needs to come out. (Photo courtesy of Joyce Flagg.)

Try it Yourself

Remove Unwanted Items

The first step in rescuing any photo is to determine whether it needs cropping or color correction. This one is well cropped but needs a bit more cyan. Adjusting using the Variations dialog box lets you add cyan and darken the image a little bit. Now you can move on to a trickier fix.

1.	Let's replace the wallpaper with a plain-colored background, choosing a color from some other part of the photo. I'll work on a new layer first, and paint the new background color on it. I've chosen a blue green from the sweater of the woman on the right, and just sprayed it on the new layer over the old background, not worrying a lot about the edges. Figure 22.11 depicts what it looks like now. Figure 22.11. Be sure you catch any cutoutssmall background areas surrounded by foreground elementsand put background there, too.
2.	Now comes the fun part. You have to swap the position of the two layers . It will look, temporarily, as if the new background has vanished. Double-click the background layer, which is the photo of the four couples. Rename it whatever you want to call it (Layer 0, the default name , is fine in this case). Then, on the Layers palette, drag it above the layer you just put down. See Figure 22.12. Figure 22.12. You want the new background behind the photo.
3.	All you have to do now is to select and remove the wallpaper, thus revealing the background. For this, you can use any of the Lassos, or the Eraser tools. I prefer the Magnetic Lasso for jobs like this, but I'll still need to do some touch-ups with a small eraser. See Figure 22.13. Figure 22.13. I'm working zoomed in to 300%.
4.	I've removed the awful wallpaper. Now is a good time to do any last-minute color adjustments. I tweaked the saturation up a small amount, and applied the Despeckle filter to remove the dust that had been on the scanner glass. Finally, because the painted wall looked so flat, I used the Lighting Effects filter to add some reflected light and shadow to the wall. Figure 22.14 and the color plate section show the final photo, ready to go up on the wall. Figure 22.14. That looks much better.