The clone stamp tool lets you select something from within your image and paste a duplicate copy of that area over another part of the image.  When you move your brush, the selected area moves in parallel, and whatever is there will be pasted into your picture.  Without some care you can get eyeballs onto walls, and all sorts of unintended results.

As with most tools in Photoshop you can select the brush size and how soft the edges are from the brush panel at the top.

Keeping the edges soft and the brush size as close to what your target area is, helps hide the effect.  That of course is the idea, you don’t want people to even know that you’ve been there.

Next on the menu bar is the blend Mode box.  These need a tutorial all of their own, but provide a largely untapped level of control. You can choose to only impact dark colors or light colors, for now, you can leave it in Normal mode for most applications.

Opacity allows you to build up layers of sampling, you can hover over the word Opacity and the “scrubby sliders” will appear, all you have to do is drag your cursor left or right to decrease/increase how much transparency you want.  Of course you can type in 50% or 20% or whatever you chose.

I’m not going to touch Flow, as I’ve never adjusted it in all my jobs.  I’m going to skip on over to the layer selection.  Sample:, helps protect your original image.  To me it is important never to damage the original picture, so everything I do is done on its own separate layer.  That way I retain complete control and can go back, even months later if I want to adjust something.  You can sample from the current layer, the ones below, or from all layers.

Remember our groom?  His suit definitely had some issues.

Both his dark suit and white shirt needed repair.  Here is what those repairs look like on their own layer.  They are built up with different levels of opacity and re-sampled frequently to avoid being obvious.

When combined together, well if you look closely enough you can tell, but…

There are tricks to working along the edges and in transition areas, but we will save those for later.

If you really want to know how lots more detail about how it is done, read Katrin Eismann’s wonderful book Photoshop ® Restoration and Retouching.

Here is the original as scanned with my high resolution scanner.  You might notice a few “issues”.  Faded yellow, cracked, stained and oh, yeah missing a top right corner which cuts a lady’s face in two.

The first challenge is picking a place to start.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I should have immediately restored the whites to white and the blacks to black.  I did it later and it worked out, but that wasn’t smart.  I divided the picture into large areas; the groom, the bride, the background, and the big tear.  Both the bride and groom were further divided into clothing, hands, face and hair, while I took the background into regions.  As I worked on each of these, I did so on separate individual layers.  That way when I messed up, and I did, I could a. not ruin the entire picture, and b. see and correct small manageable chunks.  In Photoshop, you can also adjust the opacity of each layer separately, which is nice.

So I looked at the picture and chose to work on the groom’s suit.  Broad surfaces, not overly detailed.  In restoration, the clone stamp tool, the healing brush and layer masks are your standard weapons.  In follow on blogs, we will drill down into the right ways and point out some “less right”—ok, wrong ways these can be used.  Carefully masking out his outline, in order to prevent spill over, I reached the first signs of progress. 

I wasn’t ready to tackle the detail in the bride’s dress or hair yet, so I fixed the background.  Matching random wall paper is harder than it looks, as is making the details in columns, lights and mirrors look “natural”.

After a few weeks, I felt my technique had improved enough to be ready to take on repairing the bride.

I left the missing corner for last as I had to decide what to do about the half a person in the picture.  I finally made the hard decision that I didn’t have enough information to try and create all her missing features, so she disappeared into the wall paper.  This is where the details become important and where the human eye can reveal more.  We notice shadows, when they are out of place.  So I had to create a suitable shadow of the bride on the now restored wall. The ability to use that layer opacity was very important here.

Finally, using curves and levels I fixed the overall tone of the picture and slapped on a new white border.

It took quite a while, but that was because I was learning as I went along.  It gets faster and is worth the effort.

Here is one I just did of for a friend of mine.  It is a picture of his grandfather’s watering hole.

As you can see it is fairly significantly damaged and very faded. This is something that really needs to be done in an editing program such as Photoshop (PS) rather than in something like Adobe Lightroom.  When working in PS, I always try to be non destructive.   I don’t ever mess with the original pixels and the first thing I do is make a duplicate layer.  One of the most powerful features of PS is the ability to change how the layers interact with each other, these are called “blend modes”.  If you change the blend mode to “multiply” from “normal”, all the grays return to black.

Now we are not going to talk now about how to fix all those tears and scratches, but will get to it.  Here though is the finished product. 

Have a great weekend.  

Thanks Dave