Finally, cloning usually involves a lot of zooming, so familiarize yourself with the shortcuts for zooming:

Repairing Jamie

Parts of this repair job will be easy, but other parts will be challenging. In almost all cases, the prevailing factor is the background: what is supposed to be behind the scratch?

Figure 25.4 is a close-up of the scratch, and we have divided it into four sections:

•  The tip of the scratch at the top-left will be easy, because the background is diffuse, undefined, and insignificant.

•  The part that goes through Jamie’s hair will be much more difficult, because her hair is full of highlights and contours.

•  Across her neck won’t be as challenging as the hair, but imperfections will be more noticeable.

•  Removing the scratch across her shirt shouldn’t be difficult, but we’ll need to be careful with the neckline and the subtle vertical stripes.

FIGURE 25.4  This scratch would doom a photo to the trash can, were it not for programs like PHOTO-PAINT.

Start at the top-left, where you can get your feet wet with the easy part:

1.  Zoom way in on the scratch.

2.  Invoke the Clone tool by pressing C and move out to a point away from the scratch.

3.  Set Transparency to 0, Soft Edge to about 25, and set the nib size to any size that feels comfortable to you.

4.  Right-click the mouse to set the cloning position.

5.  Now drag across the scratch. As you do, note the grafting action, and keep an eye on the +, to make sure that it remains in the background area. If it begins to intrude on Jamie’s hair, or the scratch itself, reset it.

6.  As you successfully clone a region, remember to release the mouse frequently, even if only to continue immediately where you left off. That makes undoing friendlier.

7.  Work carefully as you approach Jamie’s hair.

Repairing the hair requires that you define and then carefully follow the contours and the patterns of Jamie’s locks. As you can see in the preceding images, there are rivers of color running down her hair, and that describes the course you will need to take as you paint cloned pixels across the scratch. Here goes:

1.  Draw an imaginary line down one of the rivers, and place the + at the bottom of your imaginary line.

2.  Set the nib size just a bit smaller than the width of the river, and increase the Soft Edge to about 50. You’re not going to be able to replicate her hair perfectly—the Soft Edge is like a fudge factor.

3.  Start cloning, moving your cursor down the river. It’s important to keep the + in the river as you clone, otherwise, you’ll start picking up pixels of a different color. As necessary, reposition the + as you proceed. When finished with the first river, your screen should look something like this.

If some patches are too dark, you could increase the transparency and clone the area from lighter-colored pixels. If you find that you are creating small lines of color within the river, increase the size of the nib.

Continue through Jamie’s hair—defining, plotting, and traversing through the rivers of color. Zoom and pan as necessary; position the + as necessary; undo as necessary; touch up as necessary. Figure 25.5 shows what our screen looked like after a first pass through her hair—it should be obvious to you where we had success and where we failed.

FIGURE 25.5  Some of Jamie’s hair was easy to clone, while other parts were trickier and left some rough edges.

The left portion was much more defined, and we had a relatively easy time following rivers of color. But the part closer to her face has more curls, more abrupt color changes, and we couldn’t find many rivers to help us clone. Now the photo doesn’t look scratched; it looks folded and mutilated. (Make a note, to create a fold in a photo, use the Clone tool, and try to do a poor job...)

You could probably fix this with the Clone tool, by zooming in ever more closely, and cloning very small portions, and then painstakingly moving over by a tiny amount, continuing to clone tiny sections. But really, it’s better to turn to another tool for the finishing touches. While clone can pick up pixels from another area, and while the Soft Edge setting can help smooth over edges with intricate and overlapping areas of color, it is ultimately a flawed proposition to weave old and new pixels together perfectly.

So it’s best not to try. It’s better to gloss over the entire area, and that is the job of the Blend tool. Blend mixes different colors to make the transitions between them less pronounced. Furthermore, that is the problem that we have with Jamie’s hair—difficult transitions.

Two other of PAINT’s tools sound as if they would be relevant here, as both Smear and Smudge address how colors interact. But we find that Smear really smears colors, and Smudge is often too subtle. Both are worth trying, but we predict that you’ll choose Blend. Here’s how you would use any of them:

1.  From the Brush Tools flyout (the same one that houses Clone), choose the Effect tool.

2.  From the Effects drop-down list on the property bar (far-left), choose the desired effect:

•  Smear, the top-left effect

•  Smudge, one to its right

•  Blend, lower-left

3.  From the property bar, set the Amount to about 50 and the Soft Edge to about 75.

4.  Then just work the area. Drag over it until you can’t see the harsh edges—the places where it is obvious that you are looking at pixels, not hair. As before, do it in small steps, so you can use Undo.

Better?

We spent about 15 minutes on the rest of the recovery process. We had to redirect one of the curls below Jamie’s neck, but we’re confident that she’ll forgive us. And in the white shirt, it was virtually impossible to recreate the very subtle vertical strokes in the pattern, so we just smudged over it to suggest that the shirt is a bit wrinkled in that spot.

Figure 25.6 shows the finished image, sans scratch. How you judge the success of this process depends entirely upon your point of view. If you compare the photo to the original, expecting that they will look identical, except for the scratch, you will be less than satisfied. And if you study the area of the scratch, you will probably be able to see evidence of the cloning and blending.

FIGURE 25.6  No more scratches on Jamie

But if you didn’t know that the photo was scratched...if you had nothing to compare it to...if you were just looking at this photo on its own merits...you probably would never know that it was retouched.

Our lead author decided to embellish the photo by achieving that which he has otherwise been incapable: cleaning Jamie’s face. So much for realism...