I took this photo of my wife and while it's not the sharpest thing in the world I really like it. The problem is the three water spots that show up on her shirt. I can get rid of the two on her torso, but I can't get the one by her collar to go away without it looking like crap.
I'm interested to see the solutions that others come up with, but this was a simple one for me since the spot was on an area of relatively little important detail. Because water spots and sun flares often simply result in a washed out bright area, I made two adjustment layers, one for levels and one for vibrance. I moved the middle slider of the levels to the right to darken the mid tones and increased vibrance drastically. Then I completely masked out both layers and selectively painted them back in as needed little by little.
I didn't take the time to remove the ones that you said that gave you no trouble.
I use other techniques when the areas involves important, fine details.
edit to add: Is the image that I posted showing up for you? I'm seeing an empty box that I have to open in another tab to view.
Here's a quick take:
I approached this similarly to Robert, but I used a single adjustment (curves) and worked with the layer mask in order to localize the effect to the spots. About 10 minutes.
A quick selection of the spots, content aware fill, quick healing brush around the circles. Less than a minute. You could make it look a little better by taking a bit more time.
I normally would use the patch tool for something like this, and then go to select-->refine edge and feather the edges a bit, then find a similar area on her shirt to patch it from. The methods provided above, however, seemed to work very nicely, I'll have to try those out next time!
I normally would use the patch tool for something like this, and then go to select-->refine edge and feather the edges a bit, then find a similar area on her shirt to patch it from. The methods provided above, however, seemed to work very nicely, I'll have to try those out next time!
Your method works great for smaller spots, and for spots that are just too light (or dark) to leave enough of the underlying color and detail. In this case, with the large, diffuse spots, it's much faster to "adjust them out of existence."
Thank you everyone. I've never attempted to use CURVES, and my mask using is very very limited. I tried content aware fill, but the collar spot was being a pain.
Robert, yours isn't showing up for me either. Juliet, I never thought of it. LOL
Now to go in and try to do this myself (which is why I love this site, learning new things).
What software are you using to do your post processing?
Ed
p.s. I took a shot at a fix with your raw file. I used Photoshop Elements 9 for the fix. Dealt with water spots using the clone stamp. (Full size jpg included!)
Thank you everyone. I've never attempted to use CURVES ...
IMO, Curves should be your number one tool for adjusting tone, color, and contrast -- far more control than Levels or similar adjustments. I highly recommend exploring the use of this tool -- I think there is a tutorial or two here ... Note especially that you can apply Curves to the individual color channels in addition to the composite, and in other modes than ordinary RGB.
