What if you don't have a good photo to copy and paste parts from?  You can still do a lot of magic with the Retouch Tool.  Many of you may not be aware of all the features on just this one tool, so you really should spend some time just playing with it.  With this one tool, you can pinpoint an area of an image and adjust the brush so as to just affect that one area.  This is quite handy when you don't want to soften or sharpen an entire image, but just one area instead.  The same thing applies with wanting to brighten or darken just a small area.  In this edit of the kitty, there was only one thing I pasted from another image, the eyes.  Eyes can be very important to the look of your image.  Now I'm sure that all you cat lovers out there have other photos where you can snitch some eyes from.  To edit this version I used the Retouch Tool and the Clone Brush.  I lightened the fur and cloned to remove the wire sticking up in the fur.  I carefully lightened whisker and eyebrow detail.  For the leaves, I cloned little pieces of leaves and then used the Saturation to bring up the color.  The final photo is still much, much better than the one I started with.

Rosebud Leigh had a sticky situation.  She wanted her photo to capture the moment of Amy standing in front of the computer area.  She also had my problem.  She was shooting from a dark area into bright light.  All detail of Amy was totally lost.  There was no amount of lightening up that would fix this.  She had another photo of Amy from the same day wearing the same dress.  I carefully selected around Amy's head.  Then I pasted it on and rotated the head to be at the same exact angle.

Now the hard part.  I had to carefully clone the hair to meet with the ponytail.  I used the Color To Target option of the Retouch Tool to add red to the top part of the bow.  For the pony tail, I used the Air Brush at a reduced Opacity to carefully match the color but yet subtle since the ponytail was behind Amy.  I selected the right collar part of Amy's dress and pasted that on, rotated to the correct angle.  Then using the clone brush, I extended the white part of the collar to meet the shoulder.  For that little slice of collar, I selected a triangle area of the collar, pasted it as a new selection and used the deform tool to make it look right.  Then I carefully used the Soften option of the Retouch Tool to blend in all the edges.

For the rest of the photo, I used the other options on the Retouch Tool to fix things up.  Among those used were the Lighten Up, Lighten Down, Saturation and Hue.  And here is the finished fix.  Now Leigh can have that special moment and actually see it too!

And who remembers my new body?  When I placed my face on the cat body, it really looked odd.  I heard that!  I mean, the color was off.  I used the Saturation down to tone down the pinkish look of my face so it blended in with the fur's color.  For my eyes, I used the Color To Target to give my eyes a big green boost.  And of course I used the Soften to blend in everything.
 

You can also use Color to Target to fix face color that is off. Pick as your foreground color a shade of flesh that you like. Adjut the brush size and the opacity of the Color to Target. You can overlay the right shade of flesh. The other option is to play with the RGB functions on the Retouch Tool.

Ok.....raise your hands.  How many of your remember that great set of tips on the Retouch Tool?  I'm going to place them here so you can review them.  The Retouch Tool is a very powerfull asset for many of your editing needs.  Maybe one of the most confusing things to figure out using has to do with lighten and darken functions.  You will see there are actually 6 options, 3 each for lighten and darken.  I would like to point out that Dodge and Burn are more for enhancing than using to lighten or darken an area.  You want to be careful using them versus the Lightness Up and Lightness Down. You will get a much bigger effect with the Dodge and Burn.  Oh, old photographer tip here.  Remember that they are named for how they function.  Dodge, lighten.  Burn, darken.

THE RETOUCH TOOL AND ITS MANY FUNCTIONS--PART 1 OF 5

The Retouch tool is one of the most used tools in my Paint Shop Pro program. Its functions are so varied and diversified that the possibilities for using them are countless. For now, let's start with the first two functions--Lighten and Darken RGB.

If you don't already know, RGB is the set of Web colors red, green, and blue. The retouch function serves to darken or lighten the RGB combination of your image. The handy part about this is that Retouch allows you to manipulate small-sectioned areas instead of having to change the entire image.

For example, let's say you've scanned a picture of your son and you want to e-mail it to your mom. The problem is, you aren't so hot at photography and somehow a part of your picture was over- or underexposed. (I'll tell you in a later tip how to get that cake off his face!) For now, you want your little angel to appear to be a little angel and you want to fix that darkened area. Grab your Lasso tool, set it at Point To Point, and select around the area. (The reason for choosing Point To Point is so that you don't accidentally retouch a perfectly good part of the picture.)

Now select the Retouch tool. In the Tool control, choose Lighten RGB and set the Paper Texture option to None. Click the Brush Tip tab and designate the shape as round and the size 6 or more, depending on the size of the area you want to retouch. Keep the opacity low at about 25 percent, hardness at 0, density at 100, and step at 1. Now click and drag your mouse along the area until you get the lightness you want. Vice versa to darken a too-light area.

THE RETOUCH TOOL AND ITS MANY FUNCTIONS--PART 2 OF 5

Another use of the Retouch tool is the Soften effect. I can tell you that the Soften tool has worked miracles on my wrinkles! There are many purposes for it, such as smoothing out a grainy image or blending edge pixels, but I like the free plastic surgery myself.

To use this tool on an image, select the Retouch tool and, in the Tool control box, choose Soften and set the Paper Texture option to None.  Now click the Brush Tip tab and choose the brush size (6 or more for larger images, less for only a tiny portion). Keep the opacity low--below 50 percent is a good rule of thumb. Set hardness to 0,
density to 100, and step to 1. Now click and drag around the part of the image you want to soften. If the area starts getting too blurry, lower the brush size and the opacity. See how smooth it looks?

Perhaps the antithesis of the Soften tool is the Sharpen tool. If you have an image with some blurry parts, you can use this tool to sharpen them up a bit. This option is available in the drop-down list on the Retouch control box. Use the same settings you did with the Soften tool and drag around the parts of the image you want to clarify.

THE RETOUCH TOOL AND ITS MANY FUNCTIONS--PART 3 OF 5

Three other elements of the Retouch tool are Emboss, Smudge, and Push.

The Emboss tool will emboss any chosen area of your image.

The Smudge tool functions in the same way charcoal does when it's drawn on paper and then smudged to get depth and shadows. You can use smudging to blur parts of the background of an image and put more emphasis on the main image.

The Push tool is great for cleaning up images. Say you have a picture of your son. It's a great photo--except for the smear of chocolate cake frosting on his cheek. You can use the Push tool to push a clean area of his skin over the chocolate--instant washcloth! It also does an excellent job of extending body parts you cut off in the photo.

THE RETOUCH TOOL AND ITS MANY FUNCTIONS--PART 4 OF 5

The Dodge and Burn tools are great for enhancing light and shadows within an image.

- Dodge--This Retouch brush works well for adding some lighting to your image or increasing the brightness of small areas. Use this tool at a very low opacity for best results.

- Burn--This tool will do just the opposite, letting you enhance portions of shaded areas of an image. Because of the pressure and opacity of this tool and the amount of control you have over the settings, it works much better than, say, the air brush or paintbrush
to enhance shadows.

THE RETOUCH TOOL AND ITS MANY FUNCTIONS--PART 5 OF 5

The last ten of the retouch options all have to do with color functions.

- Saturation Up--This tool will increase the depth and saturation of the existing colors. Use it like a paintbrush to add spectacular depth to parts of an image.

- Saturation Down--Working the opposite of the Saturation Up tool, this tool lowers saturation all the way to grayscale. It works great to make parts of an image black and white.

- Lightness Up--This tool changes the brightness and light of a selected area.

- Lightness Down--This tool darkens the selected area.

- Hue Up--This will change the hue of the selected area to the next hue on the Color palette. The more strokes in one place, the more the hue changes.

* Hue Down--Same as above, only in the opposite direction... Am I sounding redundant here?

- Saturation To Target--This little tool requires you to choose a target color in the foreground color box. Once painted on, it will saturate the target color and its opposite. If you choose lavender and your picture is purple and green, it will lighten the color that is purple to lavender and change the hue of the green to a brighter tone of the same color.

- Lightness To Target--This tool also requires you to choose a target color. It will increase the lightness of the picture with a hue of the targeted color.

- Hue To Target--Again, after you choose a target color, this tool will change the hue to that target color.

- Color To Target--Say you have a black-and-white photo of a woman with a rose and you want to colorize that rose--maybe, to be really cool, even colorize her lips and cheeks. You choose a target color in the foreground box and paint it on.

The beauty of these tools is that you can adjust the opacity and density of the brushes to suit your every need.

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