Cleaning up a filthy photo

The goal of this tutorial is to clean up all of the processing dirt and severe grain of this photo that was supplied for a brochure by your client, a rose breeder.

Here's the photo you will be using. Do NOT download the GIF seen to the left. Click on the photo or click here to download the high reolution JPEG

• Step 1: Download the dirty roses JPEG: (300dpi -- 200K) and save it to your hard drive in an appropriate location determined by your class requirements or personal needs.

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  Step 2: Open the dirtyroses.jpg file: Look at the photo at 200% (the capture enlargement above is only at 162%). All of those little white & black specks are dirt from the cheap, fast film processor used. You will get photos as bad as this or worse on a regular basis in most graphic design jobs.

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  Step 3: Choose Filter>> Blur>> Gaussian blur: Blur the image enough so that all of the white and black dirt is gone. As you can see above, the originial roses picture is destroyed, but be of good cheer...

• Step 4: Choose the pop-up Option menu in the History palette and make a new snapshot of the blurred image: You can call it call it BlurredSnapshot or something as appropriate that makes you happy.

• Step 5:
  Choose the History Brush and click in front of the Blurred Snapshot to make it the source for your History Brush: It is crucial to understand what you just did. By saving a snapshot, you took a capture of the image when it was blurred. Now you have selected that snapshot to be the image with which the history brush will paint.

• Step 6: Click on the "Open" history state to paint your new History brush content into: You can see it above, right above the Gaussian Blur history state. When you click on Open Photoshop will go back to that point in the process (which is where you found all the dirt).

Here is the concept you need to understand: If we take a blurred image and use the darken layer blending mode, then the only pixels that will get changed are the ones that were darkened by the blurring action — that is the pixels that were darkened when the dirt was blurred to nothing. The background color was not darkened by the blurring. If anything changed, it might have gotten a little lighter, so the brush in Darken mode will ignore those pixels. It is much easier to do than to describe,

• Step 7: Use a large brush size and start using the Darken Mode: This will replace any white dirt with the blurred darkened snapshot. Be careful where you paint so you do not add blurring overall. As you can see, the capture above shows me using a 21-pixel brush. This is really very small. I usually use about a 500-pixel brush to get the large areas quickly, and then go smaller and smaller.

VERY IMPORTANT! Do not paint across the sharp edges (or those edges that you want to remain sharp. If you do, you willblur the edges and messup the image. Always pant up to the edges from both sides, kleaving the edge as sharp as it was.

Step 8: Eliminate the Dark dirt using the same brush in the Lighten mode. The finished result should look something like this:

You start with 20 points.

PENALTIES: 1 point off for each spot of dirt that can be found at 100% at 300 dpi.