Using the Color Replacer

Defining the colors is the challenging part; replacing them is easy. You just smear across them, like this:

1.  From the Undo Tools flyout (right below the Eyedropper tool), choose the Color Replacer tool. In the future, you can simply press Q, but in the future, don’t ask us why color replacement is considered an undoing—we don’t know.

2.  From the property bar, set both Transparency and Soft Edge to 0 and disable Anti-aliasing. You don’t want any ambiguity in this operation—you want to find every pixel that qualifies for replacement, and you want to replace it completely.

3.  Set the size of the tool so it is comfortable to operate. You can do this interactively by holding Shift and moving the mouse up or down. You can also use the slider or the value box on the property bar.

4.  Start dragging across the grayed-out area and watch how the pixels that are of the find color convert to the replace color.

You are halfway there. Now you need to remove the white pixels, or to say it more correctly, you need to turn the pixels that are white into the same color as the background.

5.  Switch back to the Eyedropper tool.

6.  Click on white and Ctrl+click on the gray background.

7.  Press Q to return to the Color Replacer tool and have at it.

Strategies for Successful Replacing

There is a technique to replacing colors effectively, and once you find your rhythm, you’ll be able to move quickly. Here are some things to think about.

How Similar?

You can tell PAINT how particular you want it to be when it looks for colors to replace. For instance, you can tell it to find only pixels that are precisely the color that you defined, or ones that are close. The property bar offers a value box called Color Similarity, and you can either use the default of Normal or click HSB, which lets you set separate values for hue, saturation, and brightness. The lower the number, the more exacting PAINT is, and the higher the number, the more forgiving it is.

We like to play it safe and use a very low number. That means that we might have to make two passes over an area, if there are patches of pixels that are slightly different (like an area that has been anti-aliased), but we prefer that to the risk of changing pixels that we didn’t mean to change.

Take Several Trips

When you are replacing, there will likely be nearby pixels that match the find color but are not supposed to change. In the examples above, the separator lines on the menu are the same color as the one we are seeking out, but they should not change.

It is inevitable that at some point you will accidentally pass over an area you didn’t mean to and change pixels that were not supposed to change. The easiest way to correct this is to issue the Undo command, Ctrl+Z. But how does Undo know what to undo? It watches your mouse clicks, not your mouse motion—it will undo your most recent click-and-drag operation in its entirety. Therefore, it’s a good idea to replace colors with lots of little click-and-drags, instead of one big one. That way, if you have to use Undo, you will only lose a bit of work.

Local Undo

If you did manage to make one little mistake in the middle of a very long replace operation, and you don’t want to undo the entire thing, turn to Local Undo. The first icon in the Undo Tools flyout, Local Undo allows you to pick and choose parts of your last operation to undo. It won’t go further back in time than the last operation, but its value is not in how far back, but just the opposite: you can undo specific portions of the last operation instead of simply all of it.

Comfortable Constraints

You can constrain the motion of the Color Replacer, and the other two Undo tools, by holding Ctrl. If you are moving along one axis, say vertically, and you want to switch to the other, press and hold Shift.

Clone: The Quicker Fixer-Upper

To the extent that PHOTO-PAINT is associated with photo restoration, you could make a good case that the most valuable tool in the program’s arsenal is the one that speaks to that task.

PAINT does not have a Fix Scratches tool, per se; it is not yet intelligent enough to study a photo, identify where it has been marred, and fix it—although program developers speculate that such a feature is not out of the question.

Instead, the tool that contributes the most to photo restoration is the one that lets you take pixels from one part of the image and duplicate them elsewhere. It is called the Clone tool, and in so far as it can repair visible scars and flaws, you would do well to think of it as a grafting tool: it takes good skin and places it over bad skin.

Figure 25.3 is a photo of our lead author’s younger daughter, and it is in peril, with a big scratch across it. But because there are other areas of the photo that have the same colors and tones as the damaged area, there is hope. You can graft from the good areas—you can clone.

FIGURE 25.3  Jamie was wounded in this photographic mishap, but we can repair her...we have the technology.

The Clone tool has some similarities to the Color Replacer tool:

•  There are pixels that get changed and pixels that determine the color to change to.

•  You click and drag to effect these changes.

•  Settings on its property bar determine how the cloning takes place and how drastic the action is.

As with PHOTO-PAINT in general, we won’t quite do justice to the Clone tool, as there is considerable depth to its capabilities. But the points that we cover here represent the fundamentals of the tool.

	NOTE You can download Jamie.tif from the companion page of the Sybex Web site to follow along.

Clone Fundamentals

Working the Clone tool involves little more than knowing your left button from your right. Any time you click the right button, you are defining the grafting position—the place where pixels will be taken from. A plus symbol (+) marks the spot on the screen. As you click and drag, pixels under the + are cloned at the cursor position (which will either be a circle or a square).

The important point to note as you experiment with this tool is that the + moves with you. As a result, you will need to regularly redefine the “clone from” position. So get used to right-clicking to place the +. This is both a benefit and an annoyance, and you will undoubtedly experience both during your time with the tool.

As with Color Replacer, you can use Undo to remove your last operation, so it pays to perform lots of little click-and-drags instead of one big one.

You can also choose between a circular or a square cursor (we find the circle is easier to dab with), and a host of other controls on the property bar. The drop-down list near the left of the property bar holds many preset configurations, but you can always work the various controls manually. The ones you will probably use the most are:

•  Nib size (a fancy word for the cursor), which can be adjusted with the slider, the value box, or by holding Shift and clicking and dragging.

•  Transparency, which paints transparent pixels atop the existing ones, the degree of which you set.

•  Soft Edge, which controls the blending of pixels along the edges. This is generally more useful than Transparency.