In this case I’m using the clone stamp tool. By alt-clicking on a good part to determine that as the source point, I can then use the clone stamp to ‘clone’ or ‘paint in’ the good parts over the bad parts. Cloning is taking the pixel data from one area and transferring it to another.

This is fairly easy to touchup here because it is black. Good cleanup jobs can sometimes take a longer time, like if you’re professionally ‘repairing’ your old photos. Photoshop’s got the tools to handle it though, be assured.

Anytime you are going to alter pixels you need to ask yourself if you need to make a backup layer. In this case I’ve done the general repairing first ON the background layer itself because that’s how I now want to keep the digital version of this image. You can then duplicate the layer by dragging it to the new layer icon as shown.

There are several different filters and adjustments you can make depending on the different scenarios you have. Your knowledge of these tools and experience with them will continue to make you a better Photoshop user. To get a complete grasp on all of these tools then make sure to grab my Basic Photoshop training where you get it all.

In this case I’m using the Dust & Scratches filter which is under the Filter: Noise menu.

This filter will get rid of dust and scratches by causing a light blur around disparate pixels that are out of place. Radius of 1 pixel keeps it to 1 pixel around the specks. Threshold deals with the intensity of the blurring out effect.around each of speckles radius’. Basically adjust the threshold until you are happy with a very low radius (ie. 1). Remember you can turn the preview on and off and zoom in in the dialog box to get a comparison view.

A threshold setting under 60 should do a good job for you of getting rid of extraneous pixels.

Once you apply and run a filter, you can simply press Ctrl F to run the same commands again. It is shown here if you want to manually re-run any filter (on the same or different layer).

Oftentimes you’ll note that the effect is too strong. Since you have created a duplicate layer what you can do is just lower the opacity. This will allow the two layers to blend together, bringing back more of the original and softening the effect.

Remember that you can make a selection and run a filter on just that part of a layer.

This background looks like it could use some work (yes that’s me in the middle on new year’s ‘96). I’m selecting it with the magic wand on ‘add to selection’.

Now that the background is selected and I’m on the proper layer in the layers palette I can do some stuff to it.

Here I can run a filter just on this selected area as I previously described. It will not affect the rest of the image. Note that in the preview box it doesn’t distinguish between the selection that’s been made and the rest of the image (maybe in Photoshop 9??).

I’m using the Gaussian blur filter.

This will help smooth it out more and get rid of some more moire from the scan in.

Remember that you will have to deselect something quite often so get used to the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl/Cmd ‘D’ or you can use the menu method as shown.

Now I’m switching to the clone stamp tool. I’m going to get rid of that white spot and replace/clone it with the wall.

I’ll clone it on both layers. If you have a layer on a lower opacity and do something such as cloning it won’t appear at full opacity either. Since this white paper mark wasn’t fixed earlier, I have to fix it in both layers so I’m going to select the background layer to make it active and also clone that layer by alt clicking on a good part of the wall and cloning it over the white spot.

If you’re really a beginner you can do a quick contrast correction by choosing Image: Adjustments: Auto Levels.

What you should get used to in order to become a really thorough and competent Photoshop user is to not be afraid of the levels command. This gives you much control over the exposure and contrast of the image (the layer that you are on). Bringing both sliders in will increase the contrast. Be sure to check out the Levels tutorial or get my Basic Photoshop video training (or both hey).

When using the crop tool (see the crop tutorial) plan on using it for permanence that this is the size that you want it now framed to (or you can save a copy).

I could crop it down even more if I wanted to but you get the idea here. There are many things you can do to keep working on and improving your images.

Remember you have the history palette and you can create snapshots of your work along the way (explained elsewhere).

Here is the original and the touchup. You can click at the top of the history palette as shown to get the original back but be VERY careful; if you make another move you’ll wipe out your entire history and start over; its safer to create a snapshot and then go back to the original view.

I’ve purposely made it a little more contrasty than I should but you get the idea.

You can also use the patch tool…there’s just so many options in Photoshop. You are fully armed in Photoshop CS (Creative Suite aka ‘8’) and with my training.

You can fix up blotches of bad areas and patch them with good areas (see patch tutorial). There are often many ways to get to the same result.

Spice things up a bit by adding some appropriate and complimentary text (find a nice font). Use you T text tool and type something in along with your character palette by your side.  Now add a nice drop shadow (once again, mandated by law in most states). Don’t get caught NOT adding a drop shadow unless your typography intention is meant not to have it.

Use the default or adjust the settings to your liking (what looks ‘right’). The shortest way to the drop shadow is through the lower left icon in the layers palette…see thine own path apprentice.

Now we have an image that’s a lot more interesting than the original. From low class to high class and you understand how to use a few more of these different POWERFUL tools and your disposal. To gain a complete insight and enlightening grab a hold of my Basic Photoshop training tutorials on DVD. You’ll be ready to design in no time flat (ok, close to it b/c there’s LOTS to learn). So what are you waiting for?!

Here I’m just covering the right half of the document.

Now choose a color that you want as your fill color. Make sure it is on top in the color picker as the foreground color. The defaults are black and white which you can switch back and forth with (D, X).

Now create a new blank layer by pressing on the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette. This will be the layer that you are going to fill on (otherwise the ‘fill’ will appear on the layer that you have selected/highlighted in the layers palette instead).

The easiest way to fill is just to press Alt Backspace. Now you have filled a selection on a layer of it’s own. It’s important to understand these basic fundamentals and also the different ways of doing them.

I wanted to make this white layer so I can review the fill lesson but also so there is something that I can put the ‘cloning’ onto.

The clone stamp tool like many others, has brush size settings which you can change. A larger brush size will give you a larger source and clone. Usually you’ll want to stay on the smaller size when cloning so you have more control and accuracy.

Make sure that you deselect your selection.

Now you can clone on top of the white space (or any other space on the document to appear on this layer). With the selection, you could only paint INSIDE of the selection. By default I’ll just get rid of selections after I’m done with them.

Just Alt/Opt click to determine the ‘source’ point. Click it once. Now you can start cloning/painting.

Click Use all Layers to determine your source point from anything in the document you see visually, otherwise it will only determine pixel data from the layer that you are currently on (so you might have to switch layers).

Note that when you clone, the crosshairs are showing you the source that you are cloning from and the brush is doing the cloning job for you. You can use the clone tool to eraser people out of pictures by cloning the background in on top of them (carefully).

That’s all there is to it pretty much. Just get comfortable using it. It will come in very handy when you retouch photographs and you can do some cool stuff with it (like erase people).

It’s now up to you to apply these powerful tools in your own circumstances. To see more of this in real world action then get my Basic Photoshop training tutorials.

With aligned turned off, you will create a new instance of the same source point every time you clone in another area with the brush. With aligned turned on, you can basically clone in all of the area surrounding the source point even if you release click and clone in different areas. Try this out or ‘get it’ in video with my Basic Photoshop training for less than $50.

To bring up the brushes palette you can toggle the window here in the upper right corner of the options bar (when you are on a brush tool).

You can also choose to open it from the Window menu as shown (checkmark means that is already open).

When using brushes be aware of the what’s going on in the layers palette. You’ll almost always want to make sure that you are on a new layer if you’re going to do some painting. Create a new layer by pressing the new layer icon that looks like a white piece of paper on the bottom of the layers palette.

You can choose a foreground color from any of the color choosing methods such as the swatch palette.

The foreground color is the color that you will paint with (until you change it).

You can choose brushes from the brush palette or the drop down menu in the options bar. The brushes palette gives you lots of options. Remember that you can only work with it when you are on the brush tool (B).

Take a look at the brush palette and scroll down to see the different kinds of brushes that you can choose to work with. Simply click to highlight one. On the bottom you’ll see a display of what the brush looks like (in black).

Remember that the foreground color is the color which you will ‘paint’ with. It is located here.

You can change it easily by clicking on the color picker to bring up the dialog box (yet another way to choose color).

To paint just click and drag. See how ‘basic’ this is? This was around since Photoshop -1.0

There are some pretty cool brushes, just scroll through and find some.

You can get a preview of the actual brush size when you increase or decrease the diameter by moving the cursor outside of the dialog box (once it gets too big to show in the preview display window).

You can also adjust the spacing of brushes. In the Basic Photoshop video training tutorials I show you how to make your own custom brushes out of anything.

See what happens in the layers palette if you just keep switching brushes and foreground colors, they’ll all end up on the same layer unless you create a blank invisible layer on which to work with.

First duplicate the background layer by dragging it to the new layer icon.

This is by no means my favorite way of getting a selection but the tool itself can come in handy in particular circumstances (such as touching up a finished selection/layer that has pixels left between frizzy long hair).

Get the tool and you can right click or use the options bar or brush palette to choose an eraser brush size. In most cases you’ll want a large one.

To erase the background simply move the background eraser around.

It is the crosshairs in the middle that determine the point of what is going to be erased of everything that is within the circle of the brush. What is actually erased and to what degree is determined by the tolerance % level.

In this case of varying greens on the grass I’m probably going to have to adjust the tolerance a bit. It’s best to use a regular eraser for vast expanses of background that need to be erased and use the background eraser when you want to erase close to your foreground subject that hopefully has a distinct color difference than the background (once again tolerance comes into play).

A higher tolerance will erase pixels that are more and more different in color range from the original (or continuous) sample point of the crosshairs (see the sampling menu).

Everything that is covered in BasicPhotoshop.com and MUCH more is covered in the Basic Photoshop DVD training program (over 8 hours of full screen full color video all within Photoshop).

The difference between contiguous and discontiguous is really quite simple. Contiguous will erase everything that is within the color range closest to the crosshairs. If there is something in the way (such as a braid of hair) that breaks up the flow of the closest color range, it won’t reach beyond to erase it (even if it is within the reach of the brush). For example here you see that contiguous isn’t getting that patch of green on the other side of her.

When you turn on ‘discontiguous’ (I hate typing that)…

…the eraser will basically jump across the vastly different outside-the-color-range-braid-of-hair over to erase the within-range-color of the patch of grass. Try it out for yourself.

Keep using the magic eraser to go around the outskirts of the subject. It’s ok to overlap of course for example with his reddish black hair because it’s not in the sampling color range and tolerance of the crosshairs.

Here’s a spot for a regular eraser which you can use later because the erasing is leaving particles and it is getting too choppy. Remember that you have a lot of tools at your disposal to edit images with. It’s important to understand them ALL.

Here’s another example of discontiguous in action. Note how it jumps beyond off color range of the picnic basket to get to the in-color sampling range of the grass inside the handle.

Here’s a result of using the background eraser tool. It’s pretty accurate for creating a clearly defined foreground object as long as you have a distinct background that separates them. When color ranges are too close together then you get a lot of spilling over and it gets ugly and even tolerance might not save you.

To take it further..I don’t use this method anymore..but you could now make an official selection of your work. Grab the Lasso tool (L) and draw a loose selection all the way around the subject.

I’m going to introduce you to another very powerful feature of Photoshop; it’s called an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers give you the flexibility and power to make powerful, dramatic improvements to your images WITHOUT altering any pixels (what did you say?!). Not only that but they are instantly disposable, temporary or permanent and easily alterable (change the settings if you don’t like them immediately). An adjustment layer appears on top of other layers in the layers palette and applies the layer of the adjustment itself to the visible layers beneath it.

There’s a few ways to create these. First go to the Layer: New adjustment layer: and then choose and adjustment such as Levels.

Press OK when this box comes up unless you want to name it now.

Now you simply make your changes in the adjustment layer’s individual dialog box. Get the settings that you want and press OK.

And for the purpose of example just doing something pretty outrageous to show you the effect of what’s going on. Go ahead and move the outer sliders to the middle to really increase the contrast.

You can see the effect of the entire image is now extremely contrasted. Note the layers palette. This is important to understand; the layer order of the adjustment layers. It can start to get complicated when you get involved with multi-layer graphic designs and some of which include custom adjustment layers (get my Basic Photoshop dvd training). But for now you need to understand that adjustment layers apply to all visible layers beneath it in the layers palette.

Just double click on an adjustment layer icon in the layers palette to bring up the editing field to make your ‘adjustments’. This is simply a fast and efficient way to touchup all of your photographs if you want. The other method is to duplicate your background layer to make an adjustment on that layer itself, but with an adjustment layer you have a tentative and flexible adjustment itself.

Give it a name in the pop up window.

Now you can press the New Action icon.

Enter a name for your new action (ie. scanned in image size, color balance adjustment, etc.)

Now all you have to do is record your action by pressing Play. When you have completed all of your actions (going through your process as you would normally) you can press the Red circle Stop button. You can take your time when recording an action; it only remembers specific commands, not how much time it took you between steps.

Remember that an action is just a set of commands or steps that you would take within Photoshop (it can ‘record’ about anything you can do). You could record an action to make a simple 2 step image adjustment. By having it as an action in your actions palette, you can just open the other files and instead of having to go through the actual steps it would take to end up with the same result (same process) you can just press one button: Play (on your new action). An action is basically an automation step to simplify your workflow (for example if there’s a single process you find yourself doing on many of images); it saves lots of time.

Also by recording actions, you can later automate and batch files-many files all at once with the same action or sequence/process. This can save you HOURS of work.

Here just record a simple action as I’m doing. I’m creating an action called imageweb. Once I press record I’m going to the Image: Image Size and changing the resolution to 72 for the web.

Once I press OK the step will be recorded (and anything else I do in the dialog box such as change the image width) in the action step.

When recording an action you are actually doing the steps you would take on an actual open document and using that as your ‘master’.

Once you have completed your steps, just press stop.

Actions can be as simple as a one-step process but can still save you time (press one button).

Now open another image. With your actions palette open, select your action (just the name of it) which should already be there; and press PLAY.

This will run the action on the document you’re working on. Instant automation.  You can see it’s applied the same step that you recorded simply by pressing play.

As a basic Photoshop user moving on, be aware of this tremendous power. Actions can get really advanced with stops, etc. You can even create and run entire batches to create templates out of a folder of files. The possibilities are endless!

Click on the Colorize box. Now you can move the Hue sliders around to choose a value which you can preview in real-time to see your wall change color.

This is cool because, if you’ll notice that the wall is still retaining its ‘texture’ and isn’t just being ‘filled’ with a solid color. This makes Hue/Saturation a great adjustment tool. You can use it a lot for such things as changing the color of people’s clothes or hair.

By moving the saturation slider to the right you are increasing the density of the color and moving it to the left de-saturates ultimately at grey itself with a setting of zero. Experiment around with changing the hue and saturation of your selection.

It’s a very handy dandy tool that you’ll want to keep in mind. Use it easily if you want to change the color of something (if you have an easy selection job!).

Grab another image that has a nice simple background that would be easy to select with the tragic wand which in this case would be magic wand. You’ll learn to use tools in different situations. For example it doesn’t make sense to use the hand drawn lasso which would be a painstaking job when you can just use the magic wand.

In the Basic Photoshop training program I teach you how to combine several different selection tools together in different circumstances for the least possible amount of work on your part.

With a mid tolerance you should easily select the sky because the color range of the point you click on will cover the sky without selection the darker mountains and monument.

Once you’ve made a selection duplicate the background layer by dragging it to the new layer icon. The selection will still be there and as long as you just drag another layer in the palette without first clicking on it you will still be on the layer that you were working on. Always be aware of what layer you’re working on. This can be a little confusing for beginners when you wonder what’s going on; you’re probably not on the layer you wanted to be on.

In this case make sure that you have the duplicated layer of the background highlighted in the layers palette. This is the layer you’re going to ‘cut’ the selection from. Now go to Edit: Cut or Ctrl X to get rid of that sky.

In this tutorial I’m going to get a sunset image from my Photos.com collection that I’ll use to replace for a new background. File: Browse to bring up the file browser or use File: Open to find an image to use as a new background.

Select the file in the browser and open it. Go to the moVe tool and click in the new image and drag it over into the document you’re working on.

When you drag a layer in, it will appear on top of whatever layer was selected in the layers palette.

You can highlight a layer by Ctrl clicking on the icon in the layers palette.  Nevermind the magic wand doing its own thing (I should have captured with the pointer on top of the highlighted layer icon..forgive me I have sinned).

Move the layers around in the layers palette so that the sunset is below the foreground layer of the monument.

Moving the layers in the layers palette only changes their order of appearance (vertically in a sense) from foreground to background with the topmost layers being on top of the ‘stack’. In the actual document window you can move the layers around with the moVe tool on their own ‘invisible plane’ or order of appearance in the stack. To move a layer around it must be selected in the layers palette or linked to another layer.

Here is the image with the monument selection highlighted (ctrl click layer icon) and the sunset background underneath it in the layers palette.

It is essential to understand and master the power of layers. You can gain this mastery with the Basic Photoshop DVD Training program.