- Draw circles around the blemishes. Position your cursor at
the center of one of the blurry gulls and drag outward to create
a circle around the bird. When you release, Camera Raw not
only makes the seagull disappear—it’s officially an ex-spot—
but also shows you two circles, one red and one green, as in
Figure 9-22. The green circle shows you the portion of the image
that has been cloned, known as the source. The red circle is the
area that the source has been cloned onto, called the destina-
tion. (These terms should be familiar from Lesson 4.) You can
move either circle by dragging it. If the retouch radius (i.e., the
circle) turns out to be too large or too small, you can scale it
using the Radius slider in the options bar. - Gauge the quality of your edits. Retouch away as many seagulls
as you like. (There are a lot of them, so I leave it up to you to
decide how thorough you want to be.) After a while, you’ll have
several circles in the works. Problem is, the very circles that are
miraculously erasing the birds are interfering with your ability
to gauge the quality of your edits. To hide them temporarily,
turn off the Show Overlay check box or press the V key. With
any luck, you shouldn’t see a ripple in the sky. If you do, turn
on the check box and edit the circles as needed. (Click a circle
to select it; press Backspace or Delete to delete it.) - Accept your changes. As always, when you click Done, Cam-
era Raw saves your changes as part of the image file. Again,
no pixels are modified; Camera Raw achieves its magic with
metadata. Programs that support this variety of metadata see
it; those that don’t, don’t.
Having lived through the bad old days, it’s fairly miraculous to me
that Camera Raw can create these localized edits so easily and so
reversibly.
HSL and Grayscale
The tabs across the Basic panel give you access to a variety of other
types of adjustments in Camera Raw. One of the more useful of
these is the fourth one over, the HSL/Grayscale tab.
HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance, and the sliders
in this panel allow you to address all three adjustments on a color-
by-color basis. In this exercise, we’ll take a look at three situations
where such control is very useful. (For a look at the grayscale part
of HSL/Grayscale, see the sidebar back in Lesson 6, “Converting
an Image to Black and White.”)
Figure 9-22.Retouch radiusDestinationSourceHSL and Grayscale 317