166 PART 3 HOW THE DIGITAL DARKROOM WORKS
How the Digital Darkroom
Revives Your Ancestors
Minor dust specks and scratches are one thing, but what about a discolored old photo that has partly disintegrated or has tears? This photo,
easily 100 years old, shows its age. Tiny scratches and spots show up against the dark clothing and backgrounds. The seated woman has deep
scratches across her collar and dress sleeve. And all three of them look miserable. Still, there’s virtually no job that a team of touch-up tools can’t
get together to take care of.Compared to the previous retouch job, the spots and scratches here are a bug infestation.
The Dust & Scratches tool in Photoshop is an insecticide bomb, cleaning them all out at
once. It affects the entire photo (or the area you’ve selected) covering over spots and
scratches, such as those marked here with white arrows, using the colors of the surrounding
pixels. It only works on flaws that are smaller than the limitations the red arrow is pointing at
for Radius (size) and Threshold (how different pixels must be to become suspect). If the
Radius and Threshold are set too high, the entire picture becomes blurred. That’s why some
spots—those marked with blue arrows—must each be blotted out manually.1 Here are the results of the Dust & Scratches (D&S)
and other touch-ups. The D&S tool softened the
standing woman’s hair, so the Sharpen tool was
used to bring back the suggestion of strands of
hair. The scratches on the sitting woman’s dress
were too big also, but because of the spots on the
dress, we couldn’t use the Healing tool. The Clone
Tool works, copying everything from a user-
selected source a set distance away onto what-
ever the tool is pointing at. It’s similar to the
Healing Tool except it’s more a manual operation
that works well for large jobs.
2