Cleaning Photos With Adobe Photoshop, Beginner Options

[Canen Art]

[size=3]Im going to explain how to clean your photos you scan into your computer with Adobe Photoshop. Its really easy and everyone can do this. Sometimes you might notice when you scan in a photo it might end up with a few dust spots or maybe the photo had some flaws in it to begin with.

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Now we are assuming you have scanned your photo / photos into your computer. First thing is we need to load our scanned photo into Photoshop. To do this click on File and then Open at the top of photoshop.

Example:


Now you need to search for your photo. Once you find where you saved it, then select the file and hit open.

Example:


Now you have your photo opened in photoshop and we can start to clean it up.
We will want to select from the menu above Filter and then go down to Noise and then Dust & Scratches...
Now your proble wondering what are we cleaning. You will notice in the example below some dust particals that show up as white specs when you scan your photo into your computer. We are going to fix those right now so you have a nice clean photo to share with others.

Example:


Now you will get a box that will open and you can select Radius and Threshold to remove the dust and scratches. You will want to make sure NOT to go to high on these other wise you will loose your photos sharpness. You will notice that the photo will slowly loose a little sharpness when you do this to begin with. Thats a good sign that you are right in the perfect area to remove most all the dust and scratches. You will notice that I selected 6 pixels on the radius and 8 levels on the threshold. Not every picture will need this much cleaning, so it will very from photo to photo. But I try not to go much higher than this, otherwise the sharpness will be lost in your photo. After you get it to that point hit the OK button and it will start to clean it for you. Here is an example below.

Example:


Now you might notice that the photo might still have a white spec or two that didnt completely clean off. Well we dont want to run the step above again other wise we will loose the sharpness of our photo. So locate any of these white spots that might be left and zoom in on them 4 to 5 times the orginal size. To locate the zoom button, you will find it on the left side of the screen in the side menu. It will look like a magnify glass. Example below.

Example:



Next we want to select from the left side of the menu, your smudge tool. You can select what brush size above, I like to use a small brush, so I will select a number 10 size brush. I also like to keep the brush set on Normal and I like to use a Strength of about 60%. Sometimes I will go as high as 75% but no more than that. See the example below.

Example:


Now I will start to brush across the white specs in the picture. Make sure your still zoomed in. This will help fix it up really nice. Heres kind of what it will look like as you start to smudge it. I like to go back in forth and up and down to slowly desolve the white specs. Remember not to start to smudge the colors to far away from the white specs. You want to stay close to the specs but enough distance to pull some of the color from the surrounding areas into the white specs. When your finished your photo will look great. See example below.

Example:


Now you can zoom back out using the magnify glass tool on the left side again, and your photo will look great.

You can see the before and after photo below.

Example:


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This concludes this tutorial. I hope you are able to clean your photos now.


Enjoy

Best Regards,

Jason
http://www.canenart.com/[/font]

[*D*]

Hi Jason, been meaning to thankyou for adding this, great asset to our tuts here and very easy to follow.

Thankyou a lot will learn with this.

[Canen Art]

Im glad it has been. Ive noticed how many people have been visiting it here and from P2L. I never realized how many people wanted to learn a little about this. Im working on another big tutorial dealing with photos too. It should be almost as detailed.

Best Regards,

Jason