Camera Raw: Spot Removal & Red Eye Reduction
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - In this video, I’m going to show you how to remove blemishes and spots from your image using the spot removal tool, and I’ll also show you how to use the red eye removal tool as well for getting rid of those hideous red eyes from portraits when you’re shooting with little compact digital cameras as opposed to using digital SLRs with big flash units on top of them.
Okay. To start out with, let’s go up to the Tools menu up in the top left-hand corner. What you’ll see first is you’ll have the Spot Removal tool. You can either click on it or press B once again to select the tool itself.
This tool is really, really neat. It allows you to remove spots. As you can see, I have a few spots here. Let’s zoom in so we can actually highlight a couple of them. For example, here are a couple of imperfections with Canon’s digital cameras on the sensors. They tend to show these dots, which are really quite unsightly.
What you can do to remove them in camera raw is actually use the spot removal tool. Click on them with your crosshair. You can then choose to increase the radius of the spot that you’re going to be cloning. Then, if you grab the green and just bring it across to a different area, you’ll notice that now the red area where the actual spot is, the red circle there, that’s where the spot is. The green is the area it’s cloning from and putting that new area that it’s cloned over the top of that blemish.
As you can see, that blemish is now gone. If we were to just turn it on and off you can see there’s the blemish, now it’s gone. It’s really great for removing camera imperfections.
One thing I will show you that I really find helpful when making these types of adjustments to my raw files is, you might not be able to see this, but there’s a spot here, there’s also a spot here, and there’s a whole bunch of other spots throughout just the sky that have shown up. A really great way of highlighting these and making them obvious to you is just to increase the contrast and also the density of the actual image, just quickly, so that you can highlight those areas that need retouching.
As you can see here, I’ve got a couple that I need to retouch that I haven’t done. The tool itself will try to make automatic selections of the areas that it thinks should be placed over the top of those blemishes. Usually, it’s really quite good, but sometimes you will need to move that green circle and place it in a particular area that is going to do the job for you.
For example, if you’re adjusting or cloning out something that is on a line, for instance, you’ve really got to get that line accurate. You want to make sure that it’s perfect, otherwise you end up with a jagged looking line that sort of looks odd and looks like you’ve done something to it.
Sometimes you will need to make your own slight adjustments in order to sort of correct those blemishes using the spot removal tool. As you can see here, I’m just going through and removing these obvious dots that are in the sky of my image. Once you’ve done that, now obviously there are quite a few more in my image, but let’s just drop it back to Fit to View. You can see that they’re removed now, although I have a couple over here that are still quite obvious, like here and here.
That’s a really useful technique for just quickly highlighting where those blemishes are and making them obvious to yourself when you’re doing your retouching, because sometimes you may not notice that they’re there. That’s what I like to do. You can also do that in Photoshop using something like Levels, and darken it off using a layer, and then just remove it later on when you go back to your original settings. That just makes sure that you pick up all those blemishes and don’t forget any.
The other tool I want to show you is the Red Eye Removal tool. As you can see, the lady in the middle has quite obvious red eye. Let’s now go and zoom in to 100% just to take a closer look at what we’re going to be working with. As you can see, there it is, quite predominant and quite obvious.
In order to remove this what we need to do is go up to the Red Eye Removal tool, which is a little eye icon. You can select E on the keyboard or just click on the actual icon itself. What you’ll see is you have a Red Eye Removal panel.
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