Birthday Girl Tutorial

This tutorial covers cleaning up a candid portrait of a child, including removing a cluttered background, dealing with noise from not enough light, and softening the look of the photo. The size of the original image is 1536 x 2048 pixels.

The child in the photo was not the most cooperative of models, and the photo below left was the best of the ones taken that day. The lighting came from large, southern facing windows, so the flash was not used. The center photo is after applying Enhance > Auto Levels in Photoshop Elements to begin the process of correcting the color. The background in this photo is less than idea and requires quite a bit of work. The photo on the right shows the start of the cloning.

Original	Auto Levels	Cloning Started

A soft-edged 100 pixel brush at 100% opacity was used initially, with smaller brushes used to finish up the details and the edges. When cloning details, it often helps to look at the image at 200% or more and zoom out from time to time to look at the effect on the overall image. The initial source for the clone tool was the wall behind the child's head on the right side of the photo, and the clone tool was worked from left to right across the top of the image and then top to bottom to cover the toys.

One of the details that needed fixing is on the photo below left is where the child's hair flips out over the toys in the background above the shoulder. Cloning around fine details such as hair can be very time consuming, so the child was given the slightly modified hairstyle in the photo on the right.

Original Hair	Modified Hair

Another area that needs a bit of touch up is the child's face. There is a small scratch on the nose and a tiny piece of lint on the forehead. These were cloned out using a soft-edged 13 pixel brush at 100% opacity. For the lint, spot just below it on the forehead was the source. For the scratch, the source was just to the left of the scratch starting at the top of the scratch and cloning down. While working on the face, the whites of the eyes were lightly dodged with a soft-edged 13 pixel brush. The range was set to "Shadows", and the exposure was10%. The original image is on the left below, and the image after the changes is on the right.

Original Face	Modified Face

The area where the toy stove meets the carpet also required some work. The lower edge of the stove was converted to look like a wall baseboard. This was accomplished by cloning the carpeting up to the bottom of the stove, the wall from the top over the stove's oven door, and the "baseboard" from the left to the right. A soft-edged 35 pixel brush at 100% opacity was used to start the cloning, with smaller brushes used for details, especially the line between the floor and the "baseboard". The initial image is at left below, and the edited image on the right.

Original Baseboard	Modified Baseboard

In a similar manner to the rest of the cloning, the toys on the left side by the plant were removed by cloning from the wall above them starting with a soft-edged 65 pixel brush at 100% opacity and using smaller sizes for details. The photo with all changes made thus far is on the left below.

Cloning Finished	Original Noise	Dust & Scratches

The light in the room was not sufficient to prevent some noise in the photos, particularly in the shadow areas such as the side of the face away from the light, so Filter > Noise > Dust & Scratches was applied to remove some of the noise. An example can be seen in the middle photo above with the original and the version after the filter on the right.

To finish the color corrections Enhance > Auto Color Correction was applied. The result is shown below at left. The wall on the right side of the photo is a bit too dark. The area was selected by setting the Magic Wand Tool to a tolerance of 10% and checking "Anti-aliased" and "Contiguous". A spot was clicked near the place where the wall darkens. Then Select > Modify > Smooth was applied with a value of 6 pixels to smooth out the selection. Since there were still gaps near the edge of the photo, the Selection Brush with a soft-edged 35 pixel brush was used to guarantee that the selection went all the way along the outer edge and to add to the selection along the "baseboard". The middle photo below shows the selection. Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Brightness/Contrast was applied with a brightness setting of "+6" to create the image on the right.

Auto Color Correction	Selection	Modified Brightness

While the color of the wall on the right is closer to that of the rest of the wall, adjusting the brightness of the selection did leave a noticeable edge where the selection ended, which can be seen in the leftmost photo below. This was fixed by cloning with a soft-edged 45 pixel brush with the opacity set to 50%. First a source on the left of the line was chosen, which was blended to the right. Then source from the right was blended to the left. The result is the second photo from the left below.

Before Cloning	After Cloning	Softened	Final

After all of the corrections were finished, the photo needed to be softened. The layer was duplicated, and Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur was applied with a radius of 14.0 pixels. That layer was set to a blending mode of "Soft Light". The result is shown above in the second photo from the right. While this gives a nice, soft look to the photo, the effect is too dark, especially in the eyes. A soft-edged 65 pixel brush was used to erase the blurred layer over the eyes, and the opacity of the blurred layer was set to 75%. The rightmost image above shows the final result.