Digital Diversity

This tutorial is about 3 very powerful tools you can use in Photoshop. These are the cloning stamp, the Healing brush and the Spot healing tool. They all work in a similar way but achieve different results and have different uses.

Cloning stamp

The cloning stamp does pretty much what the name suggests. It clones things. What it essentially does is sample your image from one area and copy it to another. This has 2 main uses. Firstly to duplicate things. The sample below shows how to duplicate the dog but it can also be used to add copies of any subjects into a scene. The other use is to get rid of parts of an image such as unwanted people or maybe a piece of rubbish on the floor. You do this by cloning the surrounding area over the subject you want removed.

Open up the image blow in Photoshop (elements or CS)

Now select the clone stamp

Take note of the available options at the top. Firstly you will want to use a soft brush. Change its hardness to between 0-20%. Click on the drop down menu called Sample. This allows you to choose how the cloning stamp will work. Current layer means it will only clone from the layer selected. Current & Below is the selected layer plus the layer below that and All layers is fairly self explanatory. Personally I tend to use Current & Below. I then create a layer above what I want to clone and do all my work on that. This way i can just delete any mistakes without ruining the starting image.

Move your mouse over the area you want cloned. Hold down the Alt key. Your cursor will change to look like a target. Where ever you click with this is where the clone stamp will start to sample from. So click on the dogs head then release the alt key. Choose where you want the clone to be and work out where its head should be. Then hold down the left mouse button and start painting the clone onto the page. The position you targeted will move in unison with your strokes from the first time you click so don’t worry if you let go of the mouse button by accident. When you finish you should end up with a copy of what you targeted.

So to simplify. When you hold down alt and click you are choosing where you want to copy from. When you don’t have the alt key held down you are choose where to copy too.

As you can see from the image above my clone is on the new layer. I had sample set to current & below and had the new layer selected.

Spot healing

This little tool is very handy for cleaning up small errors or unwanted elements on your image. What it does is sample colour from within its brush area and tries to make everything match. It sort of clones within a very small area. What you need to do is choose a brush size that’s larger than the area you want to clone over. Then simply click on the spot you want removed, making sure its in the center of the brush. The tool should then clone over it, matching it to its surroundings.

For example

In this image there are some objects floating in the water in the top left that I would rather not have there.

Select the spot healing tool. Set to a brush size that will completely cover the bits you want to get rid of. Then place the brush fully over it and click once. The object should disappear. Repeat this with all the blots you want to get rid of till completely satisfied.

Healing brush

The healing brush sits somewhere between the clone stamp and the spot healing tool. You select a point from which you wish to clone from but the tool also tries to match the lighting and colour depth of the area which you clone on to. What this means is that it isn’t particularly suitable for normal cloning but it is fantastic for cleaning up an area which has already had the clone stamp used on it. For example cloning out an unwanted subject may leave a slightly false look, the healing brush can help fix that. Its also great for cleaning up smaller areas such as creases and damage in a scanned image.

Open up the following image in Photoshop.

Select the healing brush

Then try and use it like you would the clone tool.

Hold alt to select where to clone from and then release alt to start cloning. In this instance, sample an area of grass near the coot in the picture to try and remove the coot from the image by cloning over it.

As you do it you will notice that the ground looks slightly discoloured. This is because the healing brush is trying to match the surrounding colours of the coot itself as the spot healing tool would.

You will notice that the final result looks OK but the healing brush has left a slightly dark area where the coot once was. This gives away that the image has been altered.

Go back to before you started using the healing brush and try it again but using the clone tool instead.

The result this time should be more satisfying as there is no discolouration. If you look you will notice that there are obvious cloned elements. Well now its time for the healing brush to shine. Selecting different points from the images grass use the healing brush to give the  area a more natural look. The healing brush will be matching the colours surrounding the area so you don’t have to worry about cloning from areas of grass that might be slightly darker or lighter.

The final result should be a bit more satisfying.

So that’s all 3 tools and how they work. The key is know when and how to use each tool most effectively.

The spot healing is fantastic for cleaning small blotches or colour spots off your images.

The cloning tool is for direct cloning and hiding unwanted elements.

The healing brush I tend to just use in conjunction with the cloning tool when I’m using it to remove subjects from an image. The clone tool gets rid of the subject and the healing tool will heal the area that I cloned by blending it in better.

In the image above I want to get rid of the blanket and objects on it. First use the clone tool to clone grass over it. This will remove it from the image. Next use the healing brush to clone different areas of grass from the image onto the area you previously cloned. This will give the image a more natural look and hide obvious clone markings.

This technique can be used for many things, including touching up portraits. It can be used to get rid of skin blemishes or stray hairs. Try it out on some of your own photo’s and see what you can do.

I’m sure we have all had those days when you have taken a lot of pictures, got home, then low and behold you have used the wrong white balance setting or got the exposure wrong. Luckily, with Photoshop on stand by, this really isn’t a problem to fix.

This can be done in practically any version of Photoshop. The best thing about it is that you can leave your camera set to auto white balance and not worry about it.

White balance

I managed to find one of the shots i had taken a few months ago and realised it was a rather cold. The white balance is clearly all wrong on this one.

To fix this you only need one adjustment layer. That is a Photo Filter adjustment layer. Add one by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filter.

From the adjustment options you can choose several correction filters from the drop down menu. In this menu should be 3 warming and 3 cooling filters as well as many other coloured filters. This image is a bit cold (blue) so we need to warm it up a bit. After trying the three warming filters I found Warming Filter (81) gave the best results. Simply move the density slider about till your happy.

That’s it, your done.

Using this filter you can add or remove most types of colour casts.

Correcting exposure

If you have the full version of Photoshop (CS) then this is easily done with a single adjustment layer.

First we need an image to demonstrate on.

Now you need to add an exposure filter. Go to Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Exposure.

On the adjustment layer options you should see a slider called exposure. Simply slide this to the left to reduce the exposure and to the right to increase it.

Elements doesn’t have this adjustment layer but, as always, there is an alternative method.

Again we need an image.

Now right click the layer and click duplicate.

With the new layer selected, click on the drop down menu in the top left of your layers window as circled in the image below. This is your layer blending mode. It’s a way to change how the layer works to allow it to blend with layers below it. To lower the exposure of an image change it to multiply.

You should notice the image gets darker. Now tweak the amount by changing the layers opacity (transparency). The opacity is in the top right of the layers window.

To increase the exposure change the blending mode to screen.

You should notice the image has got lighter. Again, adjust the amount by changing the layers opacity.

Simple when you know how.

You can combine this technique with the masks tutorial to correct exposure only on the parts of the image that need it.

There seem to be two kinds of people in the digital photography world when it comes to post processing. Those that do it and those that don’t. I have met many people that seem to think post processing an image is cheating. This really doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s like saying that people cheated with film cameras by using a darkroom to process their images. After all programs like Photoshop are essentially just a digital dark room. Surly its more of a cheat to try and get a camera that does that all for you. I was always under the impression that cheats did as little as possible, not extra work.

Anyway I am sure you can guess i’m firmly in the field of agreeing with post processing. So this tutorial is just that. How to process your photo’s in Photoshop. It will involve colour correction and sharpening up your image to finish it off.

The following tutorial was done in Photoshop elements 7. These techniques can be done in most versions of Photoshop.

Before we start i need to explain what an adjustment layer actually is. It is a way of correcting an element of an image (such as the levels, contrast, saturation etc) without permanently effecting the pixels on the layer. It means you can play around with the adjustment and if you don’t like it, its not a problem because you can just delete the adjustment layer or use the mask to hide parts of it you didn’t like. Its known as non-destructive editing. Some adjustments cant be done on an adjustment layer and have to be done directly to an image layer. These are destructive, which means the changes you make to them are permanent. They directly affect the pixels on that layer.

If that makes no sense try thinking of it like this.

You want blacked out windows for your car (I have no idea why, maybe your famous). You can either get tinted windows or you can put some dark film over them to get the same result. The tinted windows are permanent so if you don’t like them there isn’t much you can do bar get new ones. If you put a dark film over them you get the same result but if you are unsatisfied you can just remove the film.

So essentially the adjustment layer is like a filter being placed over an image. A bit like adding a filter to the front of your lens.

I often shoot my images in fine JPEG mode with all the picture adjustment settings on default. I find this gives me the best result to process images myself. If you turn up the contrast or saturation settings on your camera you may find that processing them is harder. The camera may over saturate a certain colour which can cause you to lose detail that you can’t recover. Using post processing you can do all this far more accurately yourself.

So first up we need an image. I looked through some images I had taken and found a ‘snap’ of a duck that I hadn’t retouched yet. In fact it was classed as a ‘snap’ which means it would have just sat on my hard drive so I may as well put it to some use.

What I have learned about the fz-28 in particular is that it leaves a slight red cast over the image. You may not notice it just looking here but as soon as you correct it, it becomes quite obvious. Each camera is different however so you may need to alter this first step depending on how the images come out of your camera.

To correct this red cast I open up a level’s adjustment layer. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels.

You will find it opens up a screen with a histogram on it and some places with numbers that you can change. If you are using Photoshop CS, some versions will have a different window that might already be open that will change depending on what adjustment layer you have selected. If you cant see it go to Window > Adjustments and it should appear. It will look similar to the ones in the sample images.

A histogram is a graph of the exposure for the image. There are many things you can do with this to correct lighting problems. The left of the graph is the shadows and the right is the highlights. The middle is the mid tones. Have a play with the sliders and see what happens but make sure you reset them before carrying on with this tutorial.

A common use of the Levels is to bring in the left and right sliders to meet the ends of the histogram. In a lot of cases you will find this corrects the lighting on an image. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t give a pleasant result. Your best bet is to try it to see if it works. If not adjust them until you have the desired result. For this photo I am skipping this step entirely as it doesn’t give the result I want.

In the image, where it says ‘Channel’, it will currently say RGB. Click this and a drop down menu will appear. Now select red. This means you are now only affecting the reds in the image. On the histogram, the left hand number box will say 0. Change this to between 6-10. You will notice that the image suddenly looks less red. If your image is like this one it will already look a bit better.

Click OK.

Now we need to use another adjustment layer. This time its the one called brightness/contrast. So add this the same way as we did with the level’s adjustment layer. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast.

A window will appear that looks like this

This adjustment is very simple and very useful. If you have an image that’s a bit to bright or dark then you can move the brightness slider to correct this. It’s a fairly simple method but useful for beginners. However in this image we will leave this alone for now. As a basic rule for my images is that I drag the contrast to about 25 as a starting point. Move it up and down till you think the contrast is about right. In this case 25 seemed just fine. You will notice the colours stand out a bit more as well as the detail. However you may also notice that some areas have not become a bit to dark. Don’t worry about that as it will be corrected later on.

Click OK.

We have corrected the colour cast and the contrast. The next thing you will want to adjust is the shadows and highlights. There is no adjustment layer for this so make a new layer that is a flattened layer of everything we have done so far. Do this by pressing shift + ctrl + alt + e. The new flattened layer will appear above the other layers.

With this layer selected go to the adjustment’s menu at the top of the screen and find  ’shadows and highlights’. It will open up a new window.

This is a very powerful tool. You can make huge changes to the exposure of your images shadows and highlights but don’t go overboard. The slightest change can make a big difference. Some images you can get away with making large changes but a lot of images will end up with a problem called haloing. This just means you will have little halo like glows around everything. For images where the exposure is fairly good in the first place use small numbers. For example I lightened the shadows by 2% to bring back the light to the ducks head and I darkened the highlights by 4% to bring a bit more detail into the lighter parts of the image.

Once your pleased with the exposure click OK.

Time for one last adjustment layer. This time its going to be the hue/saturation adjustment. So create one by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation.

In the image above I have shown 2 copies of the adjustment window. Call the first one fig1 and the second one fig2.

In this window (fig1) we have 3 things. Hue, Saturation and Lightness. The Hue changes the colours, the saturation, somewhat unsurprisingly, changes the saturation of the colours and the lightness adjusts how light or dark the image is.

As default, the drop down menu next to the word Edit will say master. This means changes you make will affect all the colours in the image. So as a first step let’s make the colour pop a little bit by increasing this to 10. Straight away you should see a difference. Now comes the clever part. You can choose from several colour channels the image is made up from and edit them individually. To choose the colour click on the drop down menu that says master. The options will look like they do in fig2. Each image will be different in what you want to change. I know the duck has a natural yellow colour so I will increase that. Select yellows. Now increase the saturation to about 10. I also want the blue to be a bit more vibrant so now change the drop down menu to blues and increase the saturation a little bit. Do the same to the cyan and you will notice the water has turned a slight blue colour.

Overall the changes are subtle but add up to give the image a lot more impact. As I said before, every image is different so work out what colours you want to stand out and adjust them. For example a bug with red eyes you will want to select the reds and up the saturation for those.

Your now almost done. The image should be colour corrected and looking a fair bit different from the original. Even now I will make these changes and will be fairly shocked how different the shot looks. I could have sworn my original photo never looked that bad before. Bit the reality is…. it did. It’s just hard to tell with nothing to compare it to.

The next step will often be noise reduction but I have left this out for now. You will generally want to use a third party software such as neat image or noise ninja as Photoshops noise reduction isn’t very good. People are obsessed with reducing noise (including my self at times) but it’s not that important for general photo’s as you normally cant even see it unless zoomed right in or making large prints. If you do want to do noise reduction then the time to do it is after all the colour correction and just before you sharpen the image.

So on too sharpening. First thing to do is create a new flattened layer in-case any mistakes are made. Do this with  shift + ctrl + alt + e. This way if you make a mistake you can delete the layer and start this section again. Make sure the new layer is selected. There are two methods you can use. In elements you can use either the UnSharp mask tool or the Adjust sharpness tool. Both are very powerful. If using CS you have other options as well. CS however doesn’t have the simplified adjust sharpness tool (instead it has some much more specialised ones).

So if you are doing this tutorial in CS you will need to use the UnSharp mask tool.

In CS this is in Filters > Sharpen > UnSharp mask

In elements it is under the adjustments options.

a window will appear like this

Your options here are – amount, radius and threshold.

Amount – the actually amount of sharpening done

Radius – sort of like the frequency of pixels it effects

Threshold – is like a buffer to adjust how much is effected.

As standard I leave my Radius on 1.5 and my threshold on 3. It’s the ‘amount’ I tend to change. I  start on 60% then adjust this until the image looks sharp.

Click OK.

The other method is to use the adjust sharpness tool. Personally I tend to use this one rather than the UnSharp mask.

This time you don’t have the threshold option but you do have a different one called remove. Make sure this is on Lens Blur, if not select it from the drop down menu. Also I leave the More Refined tick box checked.

Again, as a standard rule I leave radius on 1.5 but this time I have my amount on 30%. This actually tends to be the right amount for most images but just move the slider till your happy with the result. Then click OK.

Important – don’t use both of these one after the other. Use one or the other.

Your image is now colour corrected and sharpened.

And here is the original image again so you can compare them easily.

To really see the difference, view them both in large side by side.

Once you have the hang of this it should only take a few minutes per picture. Time worth spent I like to think.

All the tools you have used in this tutorial are capable of a lot more so why not have a play with them. One thing to try out is changing a colour using a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Take a picture of a flower, open it up in Photoshop. Then add a hue / saturation adjustment layer. From the drop down menu select the colour that is the main colour of the flower. Now move the hue slider back and forward.

Have fun.