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90. About Removing Scratches, Specks, and Holes

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

74 Import Photos from a Digital Camera

75 Scan In Photos

SEE ALSO

91 Remove Scratches Automatically

92 Repair Scratches Manually

93 Remove Specks and Spots

94 Repair Holes and Tears

It's not uncommon for photographs to acquire small scratches, spots, holes, and tears, even if the photos are not very old. If a photograph is not stored flat with its surface protected from damage, the photo might easily develop surface defects. PSP offers many tools you can use to repair these scratches and other small anomalies:

TIP

Like most changes you can make to an image, you can limit your retouching to either a layer or a selection.

• Automatic Small Scratch Removal. If scratches are small, use this command to get rid of them quickly. See 91 Remove Scratches Automatically .

• Scratch Remover Tool. This tool gives you precise control over how scratches, cracks, and small specks are removed. See 92 Repair Scratches Manually .

• Clone Brush Tool. This tool allows you to remove defects by cloning or copying parts of an image over tops of holes, tears, scratches, or specks. It's perfect for making large repairs that the other tools and filters cannot handle easily. You can also repair large holes, tears, and scratches using a technique that borrows data from the undamaged parts of an image. See 94 Repair Holes and Tears .

• Despeckle. Does your photograph have a lot of tiny single-pixel dots on it? Use this filter to remove themno matter their color . See 93 Remove Specks and Spots .

• Salt and Pepper. Large black or white specks that the Despeckle command misses can easily be removed with this filter. See 93 Remove Specks and Spots .

• Noise Filters. To remove a general scattering of dots or noise from a photograph, use any one of these filters: Edge Preserving Smooth, Median , or Texture Preserving Smooth . See 93 Remove Specks and Spots .

KEY TERM

Noise A random pattern of pixels that gives an image a grainy texture. Digital still cameras have the same picture-taking electronics as digital video cameras , so the noise that generally cancels itself out when viewed at 30 frames per second can't be ignored on a frozen frame.

NOTE

Many of the tools you might use to remove scratches, specks, and holes require that your image be either grayscale or have a full color depth of 16 million colors.