Retouching with PhotoPerfect

Hi,

As many of you have probably known, PhotoPerfect does without layer support. Nevertheless retouching is still quite easy, though different, especially if you are getting used to layers. Just want to share my try to remove the photographer's shade from the foreground of the picture with the clone option of PhotoPerfect.

First open picture and zoom in for repair details.

To zoom into the picture you can use the menu items "View/zoom" or the numpad directly (1= 100%, 2 = 200% view etc...) and move the enlarge picture around the workbench so that the desired area covers most of the screen.





Select the menu item "Image/Retouching". The retouching window opens up. Here you can define type and brush.
In the retouching window select "clone destination" (1), check the "fixed" checkbox (2) and set the brush size to a value of 20 using the slidebar (3).The brush is the circle that follows your mouse.



Next set brush reference point and retouche. To do so, move the brush to a point outside the shade of the image where colorand texture is similar to an area inside the shade you wish to repair. Now press [ctrl] + left mouse button to define the "brush reference point" (1).
Once the reference point is set, a left-click into any area of the shady part of the picture will smoothly apply texture and color of the reference point to the area you clicked in. The more often you click, the sharper the reference point will be visible within the shade (2).
Click the "Accept" button of the retouching window to apply your changes.



After that just repeat that step with different reference points

Left-click on every part of the shade to completely brighten it up. Try to use different reference points and -sizes to achieve a more natural looking result. That't the secret IMO.



By using different reference points and brush-sizes you can achieve
a pretty good result, where the shade was completely brightened up and the characteristics of the foreground could be preserved. If done well, it's very difficult to notice the retouched area.



That's easy, isn't it? I'm pretty sure that a lot of you will be able to achieve much better results then I do. If you would like to know more about retouching and cloning, the following post might be helpful:

An introduction to retouching and cloning

Best regards

Hoang-Tran