Tayonna Thomas Portfolio
✦Photo Restoration✦
The Healing Spot and Brush Tools
The healing tools can be used to patch or ‘heal’ a spot on a photo that may be old or damaged. Both tools will read the pixels around them and apply them to the area you please. The tools are pretty smart but have had a few tiny hiccups along the way. The healing spot tool will find spots to fix based on the surrounding pixels. However, when it comes to contrasting colors it can be a bit inaccurate and distort the image’s shape a tad. Which is where the healing brush tool comes in where you can replace the damaged area by using other pixels the image has. I did find however that the healing brush tool seemed to burn the colors when used to much in one area. While I was working on restoring an image with nothing but browns, reds, and yellows the area I applied the healing brush tool to began showing green and purple pixels. Overall though I found these tools very interesting and can definitely be helpful restoring old photos from long ago.
For this project we were to use the healing spot and brush tools to restore some old images of our choice. The images however must get gradually more difficult. For my first image, I used a simple image with a several spots and a crack across the photo as a test. I had to experiment with the tools first but got through the first image without much issue. The second image I chose had several more marks on it and even had a piece of the image missing. Many of the surrounding speckles were taken care of by the healing spot tool and the remainder of the white marks and missing chunk was done with the healing brush tool. I did however have some issue with the undershirt and tie. The undershirt seemed a tad splotchy to me in the ends result but other than that I believe it is convincing. The third and final image took me the most amount of time. I had the most trouble with the gradient background and the shirt. Since the image was bent near the clothing the light reflecting off of it made the color hard to place. I had some issues blending the colors together in the background but in the end result I feel like it seems more like an effect added to the background. I used the healing brush tool for this about 75% of the time.