I wanted to create a site where people could go to find out how to repair or restore their photos. I have seen a lot of people ask how to remove red-eye, remove objects in a photo that ruin it, place one person's head or face on another person's body, etc. This site is for those people. Hopefully I can help you do the things you want to do. If you don't see what you need here, just ask me (e-mail me at picman0 at gmail.com but replace the "at" with an @ and the 0 is the number zero), and I'll do what I can to help you.
First, I use PhotoShop. If you use PhotoShop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or some other photo editing program, I'll try to explain what I'm doing and what tools I'm using so that you get an understanding of the process. The tools you have in your photo editing program should be similar, so hopefully you'll be able to follow along using your software. I don't expect that many people would buy Photoshop to do a few simple edits on an occasional photo, since that's overkill, however if you do have PhotoShop and were intimidated by it, don't be. PhotoShop can be as easy, or as involved as you want it to be.
I should also mention that I use Windows, so I'll try to use as many graphics as I can to help everyone, no matter what type of computer you're using. By showing you pictures of what I'm doing, it should be easy to translate that to whatever software you're using. If the pictures are too small for you to see what's happening, just click on them to enlarge them.
So, enough with the boring stuff, let's get down to business.
Red-Eye Removal
Red-eye seems to be the most common repair that I see people asking about, so I'll start with that. Red-eye results when you have a light source, (the camera's flash) located too close to the camera's lens. If you removed the flash from the camera and held it off to one side, you would never have red-eye in a picture. Unfortunately, that's usually not possible, so when it does happen, we need to remove it with software to save the photo.
Okay, first open the picture in your photo editing software. Zoom in so that you can work on the eyes, even if the picture becomes a little bit blurry. Just make sure that you can see the red in the eyes.
Okay, now use the Lasso Tool to select just the red part of the eye. Once you've selected one eye, in Photoshop (now called PS) hold down the shift key, then select the area around the second eye. Holding down the shift key while you draw around the second eye keeps the selected area around the first eye. If you didn't hold down the Shift key, you would lose the area you first selected. Here's what the selections should look like when you're finished.
Okay, now that you have the red-eye areas selected that you want to change to a normal eye color, you can either make the change on the original picture, or, place the selected areas onto a new layer and correct the red-eye there. The best method is to place the selected areas onto a new layer because if you make a mistake, you can just delete that layer and you will still have the original picture untouched.
I'll use the method that creates a new layer, but once the new layer is created, working on the selected red-eye areas is the same, whether you do or don't place the selected areas on a new layer.
Okay, first make sure the layer palette is open. If it's not, go to "Window" and scroll down to "Layers" and click on it. Now, once you have the red-eye areas selected, go to "Edit"......"Copy" Then again go to "Edit"...."Paste". This will create a new layer in the layer palette. I like to name this layer "Eyes". You don't have to, but it's easier to remember what the layer is. If you want to rename the layer, just double-click on the word layer and type in "eyes".
Okay, now, when you want to work on a specific layer, you need to make sure that layer is active, so click once on the layer "eyes" so that it's highlighted in blue. It probably already is if you renamed it from "layer" to "eyes". If you're not using layers, just continue with the next instruction.
Now, if there is any place in the eye where you can see the real eye color, it's best to try to use this color, so select the eyedropper tool, and click in the real eye color so that you have a sample of that color. If you can't find any place in the eye that has the real eye color, then find a place that has a dark grey area, as that always works well. Of course, you could always select a color that you want the eyes to be, even if that isn't the actual eye color.
Now, once you have the color selected that you want, go to "Edit"...."Fill" as shown here.
In the window that pops up select these options: "Use: Foreground Color" and in the lower box, "Mode: Normal". "Opacity: 100%". Now click "OK".
You will now see that the eyes have filled with the color you selected, in my case, grey.
As you can see, the eyes don't look quite right yet. That's because you can't see the pupil and no one's eyes are totally grey, so we need to make some minor adjustments. Go to "Edit" and click on "Fade Fill". In this box, make sure the "Mode" is set to "Normal", then slide the "Opacity" slider towards zero until the eyes look about right. I selected 65%.
The only thing left is to see the flash reflection in the center of the eye. To do this, select the "Eraser" tool and set it to a brush size of about 4. Now, in the very center of each eye, you can see the white section that is now covered with the grey color we added. Just move the eraser tool over these white areas and click to erase the grey. This will result in the white showing through. You don't have to erase a lot, just enough to see a little white coming through. Once you've done that, you're finished!
Placing A Face On A Different Body
To do this is very easy, but you'll need to have a picture of both the face you want to use, and a body you want to use.
Open the two pictures that you want to use for this exersize.
Now, use the "Lasso" tool to draw around the face that you want to use. In my case, I want to add the smiling face to the girl in the blue dress.
Now, to move the face, click on the "Move" tool, then position the "Move" tool overtop the selected face and drag and drop it onto the second picture. (The"Move" tool is at the top right side of the tool palette.)
Now that you have the face on the picture you want, you can close out the picture you took the face from since you won't be needing it anymore. Now you can see that the face you dragged over is larger than the face in the picture, and is also turned slightly clockwise too far. To resize the new face, go to "Edit" and click on "Free Transform".
Once you'ce clicked on "Free Transform", you will see a box appear around the face. While holding down the "Shift" button, drag one end of the box inward so that the face shrinks in size. The trick is to get the face the proper size so that it covers the bottom girl's face, yet still look to be the correct size. You may need to play with it a bit to achieve this.
Once you've gotten the face to the proper size, it looks like it needs to turn counterclockwise a bit. To do this, move the cursor to one corner of the outlined box until the cursor changes into a curved double arrow. This indicates the turn function. Slowly move the curved arrow counterclockwise until the face looks like it's properly aligned.
Once you have it turned to where it looks right, click on the checkmark at the upper right side of the window. This commits the "Free Transform" to the picture.
Now that the face is in place, we need to correct it's skin tones to match with the rest of the body. This can be a bit tricky, and may require a bit of experimenting. What I like to try first is the "Color Balance" tool. Go to "Image"...."Adjust" and scroll down and click on "Color Balance".
Look at the sliders there, and try to see what you might need in the
picture. You will notice that "Midtones" is the default selection at the bottom of the window.(I usually start there). It looks as if her face is too blue, so I moved the bottom slider
away from the "Blue" and towards the "Yellow". I then tried to add a little flush to her face so I moved the top slider towards the "Red".
This didn't look bad, but I wanted to see if I could match the colors better, so I changed the bottom selection from "Midtones" to "Highlights".
I then moved the top slider towards the "Red" again, and the bottom slider towards to "Yellow" again. I was able to get the skin tones to match a little better. Once I was finished, I clicked "OK".
If you need to, you can still adjust various aspects of the image, such as size, position and color, if you finished the picture, but aren't satisfied with the results.
That's about as close as I can get to matching the face to the body. In some cases, you may be able to move the entire head to another body, but keep in mind that if one picture has hair that is laying on the body, it will be almost impossible to match up the head and hair in the two pictures. It's usually easier to just move the face.
On to the next topic about cloning out unwanted images...Page 2, Page 3