Photoshop Image Repair Tips
While much of the heavy editing is accomplished in Camera Raw, there are still image problems that can only be resolved in Photoshop. Since the common edits of contrast, color enhancement, et al., are so widely covered on the Internet and in text books, I do not intend to repeat any of that here. Instead, in this chapter I’ll offer some advice on solving some common image problems in landscape images.
Hue/Saturation Adjustment Tool
After I completed all tonal adjustments, I click on View → Gamut Warning (or Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-Y), and then View → Proof Setup → select paper profile. My most common gamut offenders are brilliant flowers, a polarized sky, or the intense warm light from a rising or setting sun. To deal with gamut clipping, especially in larger areas, I use a combination of Hue, Saturation, and Lightness adjustments since desaturation alone may dull the color. It takes iterating between the sliders and checking the gamut clipping to get it right. Note that since you’re changing the original hue somewhat, the process is a little subjective.
The following image of my granddaughter’s vest makes a good gamut correction example. The upper-right is the original color that was 100% out of gamut. When this was printed, the vest looked horrible. The bottom-right image used only the Magenta Saturation slider to desaturate and that resulted in a drab color. The left image is after relaxing the desaturation and adjusting the Magenta Hue to the right (adding blue), and Lightness to the left (to darken). Admittedly I’m tinkering with the accuracy of the color, but the results are more pleasing and notice the increased detail in the folds of the vest.

Gamut Repair: Upper right is unprintable and desaturated lower-right is too drab. Left is much better with more detail in the fabric folds, but there is a color shift.
Rendering Intent
Related to gamut clipping is the subject of rendering intent. In the previous magenta vest example, I corrected the problem manually since this provided complete control. Suppose instead you do nothing and just let it print uncorrected. What happens is the printer will deal with out-of-gamut colors based on whatever rendering intent you specified in the Print dialog box. There are various intents, but the two most common are Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric. In simple terms, Perceptual essentially redistributes the offending color to fit within the target’s gamut range, but that may alter already in-gamut colors of a similar hue. Relative Colorimetric instead pulls back only the out-of-gamut colors to within the target’s gamut range (sometimes referred to as clipping). All related colors that are in-gamut are unaffected.
For large areas of out-of-gamut colors, Perceptual does a better job at maintaining the tonality of the colors, but at the price of altering the hue and saturation. In a sense, it’s analogous to the HSL adjustments made in the magenta vest example. Relative Colorimetric retains the saturation and color accuracy, but clipped colors are changed to the in-gamut colors and that may obliterate subtle detail.
In the real-world of landscape photography, you should seldom have large areas of out-of-gamut colors. When I do encounter the problem, I always manually correct the colors rather than rely on a rendering intent. When the previous magenta vest image was printed using Perceptual (without any manual gamut correction), while better than Relative Colorimetric, it was still inferior to the manually HSL-adjusted image.
I generally use Relative Colorimetric, even if there are scattered “dots” of out-of-gamut colors (when viewed using Photoshop’s Gamut Warning). In some situations, such as minor color banding, I may try Perceptual; but be warned, you may upset large areas of similar in-gamut colors. I recommend whenever using Perceptual, view the effect using Proof Colors with the Custom Proof rendering intent set to ‘Perceptual.'
When I’ve completed editing, my last step is to click on View → Proof Colors (or Cmd/Ctrl-Y) to get an idea of what the printed image will look like. The proof is set to the last used target profile. To select a different profile, click View → Proof Setup → select a new profile.
To add a new profile, click View → Proof Setup → Custom (see below). Name the profile and select your paper’s profile in the Device to Simulate menu. Enable ‘Black Point Compensation’ and ‘Simulate Paper Color’ for better accuracy. Select whichever rendering intent you want (I always use Colorimetric), or you can create multiple profiles for different rendering intents. Make sure to save the file when finished.

Customize Proof Condition: Above is a proof setup for Epson’s Luster paper with my recommended settings.
Vibrant to Dull
When viewing the proof image, you’ll usually notice some loss in contrast, saturation, and brightness. This is to be expected since you’re dealing with a reflective print, not a luminous monitor. There are a couple ways to deal with this. One is to add a Curves adjustment layer before printing to boost up the image.
While a Curves adjustment may help, it’s often not the most satisfactory solution. A better method that I use now is to duplicate the image layer and convert it to a Smart Object. Then, I use the Camera Raw Filter to spice it up. Using a Smart Object layer allows me to change it until I have the closest match to the original screen image. When happy with the results, I rasterize the Smart Object layer to reduce file size and save it for future use.
Premium Fine-Art Paper
If the preceding seemed like too much hassle, another solution is to use a high-quality fine-art paper. I will cover this a bit more in Chapter-16, but the point is that some fine-art papers show much less difference when Proof Colors is enabled. The downside is, of course, cost. If you want to explore fine-art papers (especially from third-party suppliers), download their profiles and use Proof Colors to compare the differences.
Vignetting is often a problem with wide-angle lenses while using a polarizer or square filter holder. Any vignetting isolated in open sky is easily eliminated by using Photoshop’s Patch Tool set to Content-Aware. Simply select the dark corner and drag the selection over to normal sky until the preview is satisfactory, then release the mouse and the corner is fixed. In the image below, this would be true for the upper-left corner, but the upper-right corner (circled red) is a different problem. Here, both the sky and part of the mountain are affected.

Corner Vignetting
You could try the Patch Tool on the entire corner, except in this particular case it created artifacts that weren’t part of the original image. A second approach is to use the Patch Tool on each area separately, which should yield better results.
However, the best results I obtained were to create two layers and work on each area separately. I selected only the corner sky along with a large chunk of normal sky (to use for a color reference) and created a mask from the selection. Then, I copied the selected sky to a second layer while holding down the shift key to maintain the same relative position. On the new layer, I used the Patch Tool to fix the vignetted sky by dragging it over to normal sky. On the original layer, I inverted the mask and used the Patch Tool to fix the vignetted mountain portion. Below are the results.

Repaired Upper-Right Vignetted Corner
I use this mainly for HDR images since they may pick up noise from the HDR processing. For all other images, I would have applied noise reduction in Camera Raw if needed. To apply noise reduction click: Filter → Noise → Reduce Noise. Establishing the optimum noise reduction does take some iterating to find the best balance between the Details sliders and the Strength and Reduce Color Noise sliders. The challenge is finding the best compromise between the least noise while retaining sharpness. As mentioned previously in the Camera Raw chapter, if you find this process a bit perplexing, consider the Nik Dfine 2 plug-in discussed in Chapter-16.
To judge the noise reduction effectiveness, I look at the main screen, not the preview window in the Reduce Noise dialog box (make sure to check the Preview box). I then zoom between 200% to 400% on a continuous tone area such as a blue sky. At the same time, I monitor low-contrast fine-detail to make sure it doesn’t become too soft or obliterated. Looking at only sharp details can be misleading. If you can’t simultaneously view both continuous-tone and fine-detail areas, then create a second window to display them separately. To do that, click: Window → Arrange → New Window for (file name). Then click: Window → Arrange → 2-up Horizontal (or Vertical). Make sure both windows are equally magnified and scrolled to the appropriate areas (see example below).

Split Screen: Left window shows soft sand detail and right window shows noise in sky.
When I remove a distracting object, I first tussle with my conscience over being honest with the depiction, or if it’s a necessary alteration. My rule-of-thumb is I remove it if the distraction is transient, such as a flying bird, trash, a passing person, or jet contrail. If the object is a permanent part of the landscape then, unless there is some compelling reason, I leave it alone. When I do extract something, I turn to Photoshop’s amazing Spot Healing Brush Tool with Content-Aware enabled. Alternately, I can use the Lasso Tool to select the object and then press Shift-Delete, and in the pop-up window set Content Use to ‘Content-Aware’ and Blending Mode to ‘Normal.' In the Oak Lane image below, there’s a distracting piece of trash (circled red). A rough lasso selection (bottom-left) and one Shift-Delete-Return, and presto it’s gone (bottom-right).


Oak Lane, Napa Valley: Distracting trash (circled red) is easily eliminated by roughly selecting it with the Lasso Tool (bottom-left) and pressing Shift-Delete, then selecting Content-Aware and Normal Blending, and finally Return.
Edit Content-Aware Fill
Photoshop use to be in sole control of its seemingly magical Content-Aware feature. Now, since Photoshop 2019, you are allowed to help wave the magic wand. Previously, the analyzed area was always fixed and that usually wasn’t a problem for small items since any minor flaw was hardly noticeable. However, as the deletion area increased, so did the chances of visible flaws or odd results.
Example
The image below includes a routine white-balance card reference shot. For this example, I’ll try to eliminate my hand and the cards. Initially, as in the previous Oak Lane example, I would select the hand and cards and use Shift-Delete. The results shown in the next image are passable, but the moss at the base of the tree seems unnaturally “slapped” on.

Example Image: Objective is to eliminate hand and cards

After Shift-Delete: Results at tree base is less than satisfactory.
To improve the results, I need to tell Photoshop to exclude areas that aren’t similar to the repair area. To accomplish that, with the selection of the hand and cards active, I clicked Edit → Content-Aware Fill to call up the screen shown below. The left side shows in green the areas that are analyzed. Using a brush tool, I painted out those areas I wanted excluded, as shown in the screenshot below. Conversely, I could have used the Custom mode and just painted in the areas I wanted analyzed. The results are previewed on the right. When I was satisfied with the results, I clicked OK and the results are shown in the next image. The tree base now has a more natural appearance.

Content-Aware Fill Edit Screen: Green indicates areas of analysis. A brush tool can either add or delete areas for analysis. In this case, I included only the autumn foliage.

After Editing Content-Aware Fill: Judging results can be subjective, but in my opinion the tree’s base has a more convincing fill-in.
Note that when brushing out (or brushing in) green areas in the Content-Aware window, do it in small steps and observe each result in the Preview window. I’ve noticed that one minor exclusion (or inclusion) could make a noticeable and sometimes bizarre change.
Battling flare is like fighting a dragon, the bigger the dragon, the less likely you’ll win. Nevertheless, there’re a few ways to sharpen your sword and improve your chances. Of course you should minimize the problem when taking the photo as was discussed back in Chapter-9. To attack the problem in post-processing, I find the best methods are the Spot Healing Brush and/or Patch Tool, the Paintbrush and Eyedropper tools, and layer blending.
Either the Spot Healing Brush or Patch Tool, set to Content-Aware, is a fast and effective treatment for small areas with dark-colored flare. It may, however, destroy some image detail, especially if the area is large. The alternative is to select the Paintbrush and set the mode to ‘Color.' Then, hold the Opt/Alt key to display the Eyedropper tool and click it on the most representative color that is adjacent to the flare. Now, use the Paintbrush tool to paint over the flare. If the flare overlaps areas of different colors or tonality, then work in sections by clicking the Eyedropper next to each section.
Finally, a third option is to layer two images and banish the flare using masks. For example, if you used your finger to block the sun, place that shot below the flared image and, by using the Eraser tool at various opacities, “erase out” the flare on the upper layer. This works only if the shots were taken in quick succession and with identical exposures.
Layer Blending Example
In this example, I was shooting into the sun as it broke above the horizon. The photo directly below was my favorite, but was ruined by the flare. A shot taken a few seconds sooner had much less flare (second photo), but I didn’t care for the foreground lighting. Despite the excessive flare in the top photo, the flare that spilled into the foreground rocks was easy to remove. Likewise, the flare near the sun in the earlier shot was relatively minor, so merging the two was the solution.

Sun Flare: I prefer the foreground lighting in this shot, but the upper image is riddled with flare.

Earlier Shot: Taken a few seconds earlier, the foreground is shaded. Luckily, the flare around the sunrise is relatively minor.
I took the photo with the excessive flare and extracted the foreground rocks and used a combination of the Spot Healing brush and Paintbrush technique to quickly dispatch the flare spots. To remove the minor upper-flare in the earlier photo, I used only the Paintbrush method and worked a small section at a time. I then overlaid the extracted foreground on the earlier image and enhanced the composite in Photoshop, producing the final image below.

Final Image
Adjustment Brush Example
Sometimes, flare can appear in peculiar ways and needs a different approach. For instance, take the blowup of the vineyard scene used in the Chapter-9 article on flare. The bottom-right vine trunk is washed out and neither the Healing tool or Paintbrush method can fix this. Instead, the rescue tool is the Adjustment Brush in Camera Raw. This can be done in either Camera Raw or in Photoshop via the Camera Raw Filter. By painting over the affected trunk area and applying a hefty amount of Contrast and Clarity, and then tweaking the Temperature/Tint, Exposure and Highlight/Shadows sliders, the problem is mostly resolved (see second image).

Lens Flare Washout: In this enlargement, the vine trunk is washed out due to lens flare.

After Using Adjustment Brush: The trunk is nearly restored to normal.
There are various ways to remove dust spots, such as the Clone Stamp or the Dust and Scratches filter. My favorite method is to use the Spot Healing Brush with Content-Aware enabled and the Mode set to ‘Lighten.' The drawback is it doesn’t work on Smart Object layers, so you need to add a blank layer above the Smart Object layer and work on that instead. Caution: anytime you add a blank layer to edit in this fashion, do not return to Camera Raw and alter (or add) any cropping that was previously performed. The reason is this may misalign the two layers when you return to Photoshop. This is one of the reasons why, as a practice, I never crop in Camera Raw.
You can also remove spots in Camera Raw using the Spot Removal tool with the ‘Heal’ option selected. You just click on the dust spot and it automatically finds a reference area for the repair. It also has a handy Visualize Spots option that displays all the “potential” dust spots. Just be careful you don’t accidentally erase legitimate detail using this option.
I previously described in Chapter-9 the technique of increasing depth-of-field by blending multiple frames taken at different focus points. I also warned that if you use Photoshop instead of a third-party program, the process can be long and frustrating due to its propensity for artifacts.
Focus Stacking in Photoshop
I first process the frames in Camera Raw with synchronized common adjustments. If I’m in Bridge, I select the frames and click: Tool → Photoshop → Load Files into Photoshop Layers. Alternately, I can load the files within Photoshop by clicking: File → Scripts → Load Files into Stacks and click ‘Browse’ to select the files.
With the files loaded in Photoshop, I select all the layers and click: Edit → Auto-Align Layers and choose the Auto Projection option. Then I click: Edit → Auto Blend Layers → Stack Images and enable ‘Seamless Tones and Colors.' After some crunching, each layer receives a customized mask that collectively blends all the layers with their sharpest portions. Initially, the image looks great until you go to full magnification and see all the warts.
From this point on, what further editing is required depends on the nature of any artifacts. An example is the following photo where Photoshop inexplicably masked out pieces of the focused background that were near edges of the foreground brush (see inset). The results were areas of blurred background looking like halos around the edges of the foreground brush. I had to spend considerable time editing the layer masks in Photoshop to restore the missing focused-background pieces.

Focus Stacking Artifact: The inset shows a sample of the “halo” of blurred background before it was removed in this final image.
Despite Photoshop’s focus stacking unpredictability, if you have the patience, you will eventually yield a good image. The key to minimize the tediousness of editing is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ve noticed that minor artifacts left uncorrected are often camouflaged enough to be unnoticeable on the print unless you know where to look.
Third-Party Focus Stackers
As mentioned back in Chapter-9, third-party applications such as Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker do a much better job. When I used Zerene Stacker on the above image, it did not exhibit the same (or any) artifact problems. Both vendors offer a free download demo, so it’s worth trying if you plan on being a serious user of focus stacking. I use Helicon Focus because I felt it was more polished than Zerene Stacker, which had a somewhat “shareware” feel and was also more expensive.
Photoshop has many tools to address the frustrating task of making selections or masks. In Photoshop CC (2014), they added a new one called Focus Area. This tool, located under the Select menu, selects all focused imagery within an in-focus range that you either specify or let Photoshop do automatically (Auto mode). When the selection is made, you have options to add or delete portions of the selection as well as use the Refine Edge tool.
Though this tool has immense potential in general photography (portrait photography comes to mind), its usefulness in landscape photography may be less so. The objective of most of my landscape shots is to maintain as much front-to-back sharpness as possible. On the other hand, macro and wildlife photography may benefit by isolating a distracting background.
In wildlife photography, you’ll likely use a telephoto lens at a wide aperture that already blurs the background. But there are times you need more depth-of-field and that may increase background clutter. I don’t do much wildlife photography, but I do occasional macro work and often encounter the same problem. Trying to keep a background that is near the subject blurred while keeping the subject in sharp focus can be a challenge.
With Focus Area, you can quickly select the sharpest portion of the image, invert the selection (select Inverse under the Select menu), and then run Blur Gallery under the Filter menu. With Blur Gallery, you can vanquish the background to whatever degree you wish.
Example
The following image is a cactus flower that competes with a distracting background.

Original Photo
To address the problem, I selected Focus Area from the Select menu, which displayed the dialog box below. To control the selection range, you either adjust the In-Focus Range slider or click the Auto button. In this case I manually adjusted the slider for the best results. While this accomplished most of the heavy lifting, I still needed to edit a few small portions of the selection. Initially, I used the Add/Subtract brushes to fix the major offenders. With the Add/Subtract brushes, you roughly paint the desired area and Focus Area figures out the rest.

Focus Area Panel
How perfect the selection should be depends on how much background blur you intend to apply. Extreme background blurring will reveal selection flaws more, but generally it isn’t necessary to be too obsessive about it. In the cactus example, I needed to improve the selection a bit more around the needles by using Refine Edge. Incidentally, you may wonder about the new ‘Subject’ option under the Select menu as an alternative. In this case, it yielded a very sloppy selection.
After I touched up the selection with Refine Edge, I clicked OK. Back in Photoshop, I inverted the selection and ran Blur Gallery. Using the Field Blur option, I applied 150 pixels of blur, resulting in the image below.

Final Image
A Different Trick
An alternate way to circumvent a distracting background is to shoot with a wide aperture and use focus stacking to maintain complete sharpness of the foreground subject while keeping the background sufficiently blurred (see example below). Obviously, this works only with static scenes. I suggest you first focus on the farthest focus point and, using the aperture stop-down, select an aperture that provides the desired background blur. Since you’re using a wider aperture with narrower depth-of-field, use very-fine focus increments for each shot.

F/22: A single frame shot at f/22 kept the entire flower in focus at the expense of background clutter.

F/3.2: Multiple focus-stacked frames shot at f/3.2 kept foreground flower in focus while blurring the background.