Lightroom 2, heal/clone tool best techniques

[maxmalossini]

<p>I have been spotting a few bw negs that are chuck full of dust. What a pain. But I'm doing it anyway because I think they are very good shots ( parks and people in Paris).<br>

As I'm using the heal and sometimes the clone tool, should I keep the size of the brush the smallest possible or is it generally a good idea to make the brush circle bigger than the spot you are removing?<br>

Obviously I know that if the spot is right in the middle of other things you have to keep the brush small, but what if the spot is in the middle of the sky, or a bushy tree or places where everything is failry uniform?<br>

Also, how easy is it for an expert eye to recognize digital artifacts (Iguess that's how you call those blemishes or darker/lighter areas in the image?).<br>

Thank you,<br>

Max</p>

[maxmalossini]

<p>p.s: I do not have phtoshop, only lightroom 2.3</p>

[godfrey]

<p>Experiment. It's all I can say, really. I was just spotting a scan of an old transparency (30 years old!) and I found it very easy to just keep moving and working with it, not thinking too much about the *best* way. Over time you get a feel for what works nicely and just do it. </p>

[Brad_]

<p>Both tools work great. Experiment. BTW, it you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, rolling the wheel changes the brush size. Neat...</p>

<p> </p>

[ben_ballard]

<p>I'm still on LR 1.3 (need to upgrade). I try to make the spots as small as they can be. I've noticed sometimes even with the clone tool, especially when I'm doing a row of circles to cover up a scratch, the clone is really more of heal at the edges (presumably so there is never a noticeable circle as an artifact of the tool.</p>

[tonysvision]

<p>I claim no great knowledge, just what i think i've observed from working with LR2 for a couple of months. It seems that the difference between the two tools is that the clone tool allows you to choose the spot it clones from, while the heal tool is a smart clone tool, in that it somehow automatically finds a place to clone from that is similar in texture to the area you are fixing. I am certainly open to correction on this.<br>

As for the brush size, as someone else pointed out, the smaller the better if the area is complex. In a uniform area, like the sky, it probably doesn't make any difference, other than the amount of computing it takes. if you find a delay when spotting, it might help to use a smaller brush, as I have done with the similar Photoshop tool and a slower computer.<br>

The scroll wheel brush diameter adjustment is indeed very cool - discovered that by accident. PS now seems lame by comparison in that regard.</p>

[peter]

<p>You may have to open to edit in PS to do this well. I recall you can do this in Lightroom.<br>

A couple of PS tricks to try.<br>

I am using Paint Shop Pro Photo x2 and it has a couple of automated healing tools - a spot remover and a salt and pepper filter to name two that come to mind. Often I try both and that gets rid of a lot of smaller junk (I dont like setting it too agressive as it can reduce sharpness and what one misses the other gets.) I think some versions of PS and PSE have some similar tools??? Its been a while and I cannot recall precisely but that is my distinct impression. The point is that these tools help when there are a lot of small faults and should not be ignored as part of a package of fixes. <br>

Second with skies and other areas of smooth, common color/tone, it helps tremendously to select the area using the magic wand tool (or whatever its called in PS and when you are happy with the selection, then apply a Gaussian blur experimenting wiht 2 pixels and working up to perhaps 4 or even 6. As its a sky and skies should not have sharp edegs it does nto matter if you use a fairly large blur factor in most cases. This gets rid of a lot of junk too, by smooshing it out across a larger area and making it less obvious.<br>

The healing brush in PS is great because it helps select pixels that are as similar as possible to the ones surrounding the flaw. (I often struggle with cloning as even when colors look the same they often vary enough to cause problems when you over write a spot) In skies when you do this, because skies often go from darkish at the top to lighter near the horizon it pays when cloning to set the area selected where the pixels are from to be at the same "height" above the horizon to the area you have to cover and as near as practical to that spot. Otherwise you have to set the opacity to low and go over it multiple times to get a result that is not an obvious fix.<br>

There are some specialised filters for this too. I think one has been published as freeware by Polaroid. Sorry I do not have details to hand. But I recall it works pretty good.<br>

But I do have a link - see the bottom of this page.<br>

<a href="http://alphatracks.com/archives/134">http://alphatracks.com/archives/134</a></p>

[katherinemichael]

<p>I always make the brush size just <em>slightly</em> larger than the spot to make sure there isn't any edges left. I have also used the clone first and the heal after if the clone looked too rough or unnatural. The tight spaces are the most difficult. I would say I use the heal tool the most and keep the selection area as close to the spot as possible for the best color and pattern match. </p>

[ben_ballard]

<p>Tony, you can select the source for the heal or clone with either tool. I think the difference is that heal is more of a blend of the target with the source, while clone is a copy of the source (blended only at the perimeter).</p>

[maxmalossini]

<p>I posted some of these photos on my gallery page. some are only being worked half way, so you could see the dust in half the image and the other half is "clean". May be you can't see it because of the extreme jpg compression (the tiff scans are very large: 23 mb each).<br>

Ben, you are correct, with both clone and heal you can choose the source, and it works great. You usually want to choose the source in mixed areas, and let lr be smart in areas that are uniform and not border areas. If you don't like what LR chose for source you can show all the healing spots by pressing H and then relocate the source for your particular spot.<br>

Tony, you are right about the computer slowing. In fact the unacceptable delay after every healing click convinced me I needed a new pc. Now it's much better with a dual 2 core and 4 gb ram. It must be a very intensive algorithm though, because when I spot quickly, jumping from one spot to another, it still is not lightning fast even with the new pc.</p>