164 PART 3 HOW THE DIGITAL DARKROOM WORKS
How Software Removes Dust
and Tears
Copy a patch that is similar in texture and color,
and paste it on top of the dust specs in the hair.1
With the hair, the texture and color match, but
there’s no transition from the patch to the sur-
rounding area.2
With the cheek, the pattern is fine, but the
color tone is too different.3
The advantage of digital photos is that they can live indefinitely in the form of 0 and 1
bits without the slightest mar. But most photographs taken a generation ago or more
aren’t digital (yet), and they’ve usually suffered the scratches and soils of shoe boxes,
drawers, and wallets. Scanners come to the rescue, but they need help from a photo
editing program to erase the scars of your heirloom photos’ previous existence.
The first tools of choice for photo restoration are theCloningandHealing tools,
which easily fix a photo album full of imperfections with a dynamic form of
copy and paste. To see how, let’s look at where an
ordinary copy and paste fails.