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Both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have tools designed specifically to restore your digital photos. They can help remove the signs of age, wear and tear, and outright damage in the form of tears, rips, scratches, and missing content.
You can find two tools in various software that are designed specifically for healing moderate-sized areas:
- The Healing Brush: Copies pixels from one place to another while modifying the copied pixels so that they take into account the texture and brightness of the underlying image. Available in Photoshop 7, Photoshop cs, and Photoshop Elements 3.0.
- The Patch Tool: Overlays a portion that you want to repair with a patch taken from another area, but modified so that the patch takes into account the texture and brightness of the image underneath. You can find this tool in Photoshop 7 and cs.
You might also run across a third tool, the Spot Healing Brush. This tool performs its healing magic only on specific areas you click, such as dust spots. Photoshop Elements 3.0 features this tool.
Using the Healing Brush
The Healing Brush repairs or heals the current image being painted over — using this brush doesn't replace the image completely.
To use the Healing Brush, follow these steps:
1. Identify the area that you want to heal and pick content from elsewhere in the image that you can use to heal the wound.
2. Click the Healing Brush in the Tool palette to activate it.
A set of options appears in the Options bar.
3. Using the Options bar, establish the tool's settings.
You can leave them at their default settings if you want, but you may want to make adjustments:
• Brush: The Brush setting lets you choose the size of the brush that you want to use and whether it's hard- or soft-edged.
• Mode: Choose how the pixels blend. Normal is the default setting.
• Source: If you select the Sampled option, the Healing Brush copies pixels from a place that you select in the image.
• Aligned: When you select your source area (where you take the healing content), you can select this option so that the distance or offset between the source and target remains the same as you paint over larger damaged areas.
After you adjust all the settings that you want or need to, you can begin using the Healing Brush.
4. Sample the spot that you want to use to heal the damage by pressing the Alt key (Option on a Mac) and clicking the healing content.
5. With your healing content chosen, go ahead and click or drag over the damaged area.
The content that you sampled (with the Alt or Option key and your mouse) covers the damage.
Working with the Patch tool
Unlike the Healing Brush, which lets you paint content from one place to another, the Patch tool works by applying a selected shape from one spot on the image to a damaged spot somewhere else in the image. You can use this tool to cover damage (such as scratches, spots, and stains), or you can use it to replace unwanted content with something more visually appealing.
 | Photoshop Elements doesn't offer this tool; only Photoshop 7 does. You may find it quite like using Copy and Paste to copy content from one place to another, a procedure that both applications support. The difference between using the Patch tool and doing a simple Copy and Paste to cover up unwanted content or damage is simple: When you place the patch over the unwanted content, the lighting and shading in the target area is applied to the patch. |
To use the Patch tool, follow these steps:
1. Check the Layers palette to make sure that you have the right layer active.
If it isn't visible, you can activate it from the Window menu. This step keeps you from patching the wrong layer's content onto another part of your image.
2. Visually choose which part of the image you want to use to cover the unwanted or damaged area.
3. Click the Patch tool to activate it.
You may have to switch to it from the Healing Brush because these two tools share one spot on the toolbox.
4. Using the Options bar, choose either Source or Destination for the patch.
If you didn't select the patch area before turning on the tool, select Destination.
5. Take the mouse and draw a line around the area that you want to use as the patch.
6. Drag the selected patch area onto the damaged/unwanted spot.
Wait a second and see the lighting and shading change to make the patch match the surrounding pixels so that the patched content blends in.
7. If you have a large area to patch, you can do it in small pieces, repeating Steps 5 and 6 for each piece.
 | After you patch your entire damaged or unwanted area, you can go through and use the Blur or Smudge tool on any visible edges. If you place one large patch over a large trouble spot, you may have to blend it with any drastically different adjacent pixels. Sometimes, if the damaged area is a very light color and has a dark area right next to it, you don't get the smoothest patch-matching. |
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