Insights of 2 Scrappy Sisters: Scratch My Back

Last time we learned how to straighten those photos but what about blemishes and scratches?

First we will work with the those pesky blemishes that always seem to appear when you least want them.

First you have to find the photo you want to work with. This one is of my dad and his sisters.

The ninth icon down on the toolbar is the cloning tool. If you click on the arrow next to it, you will get a pop-out menu with the clone, scratch remover and object remover tool. First we are going to work on the scratch remover tool, so go ahead and click on it. Then on the presets bar above, set the size. You may want to test one or two sizes out and then redo (control z) until you get the right size. Your scratch will need to be inside the smaller rectangle. The outside rectangle samples the surrounding pixels to make the changes to the scratched area.

Start at one end of a straight scratch, then click and hold as you drag it to the other end. Release.

Once you release, you will see that your scratch is gone.

This is kind of fun and easy so go head and make any other straight line scratches disappear.

Sometimes you will try the scratch remover on an area that you think should be fairly easy to fix, but when you finish you find out that other colors appear, as in the image below when I tried it along the bottom of the shadow. What happened is that the bottom area of the outside rectangle was picking up the colors from the grass.

This is when we need to switch to our clone tool. This works much like the scratch remover and the makeup tool, except we get to chose where the clone brush is going to pick up the color from. So chose your clone brush and set the size on the presets bar above. Normally you are going to want to keep the hardness relatively low. I would start at 50 and adjust from there. The size is determined upon the size of the area you are trying to hide. In my case, I have the brush set at about 8.

You will notice that once you bring your brush over the image you will have two circles. One with an "x" and another with a "+". The "+" is the brush and the one that will set the area you want to clone from.

Placing the "+" near but not on the area you want to hid but within the color you want to clone, right click. Now put the "+" over the area you are hiding and start taking small clicks over the area, making sure you are not picking up unwanted colors. If you start to (control z) undo and pick another area close to clone.