Fixing Photos

Sometimes you need to fix problems with a photo, or even a number of photos. I have a lot of photos from our various trips, and according to Flickr where I have a Pro account, I have at the time of writing 13K photos, and I don’t plan to stop. Managing all of this can get tricky. I generally start with digikam, which is my photo manager of choice. I tend to store my photos by date, with a each day being its own directory, so it is easy to load all of the photos from a given day in digikam, and from there I can click the Preview button to see the photo in a larger size than the thumbnail. And you can navigate from one to another using the arrow keys on your keyboard, or to jump around more click the Thumbnails button, then select a photo, and click the Preview button again. Once you’ve done this a few times it becomes second nature.

Fingers in Photos

This brings me to one of the first fixes I have had to do. These days I take nearly all of my photos with my Android phone because the quality is good enough that there is no need to do anything else. And it means I don’t have to lug around any equipment since I will always have my phone handy. But this does have one potential downfall, and that is an errant bit of a finger in the photo. I recently (as I write this) came back from a month-long visit to France, and had quite a few photos, and some of them had this fault. It is a simple fix really, I just cut out the bad part. This starts with digikam, where I load up a directory of a day’s photos, then click the Preview button, then scroll through the photos one at a time. When I find one that has the errant finger, I check the file name of the photo, then open it in GIMP. The first dialog box I deal with is about changing the color scheme, and I always tell it to Keep the original scheme and not convert it. I don’t want to do anything major to change the photo other than cut out the finger. When the photo opens in GIMP I select the Crop tool and Drag it to exclude the errant finger. In other words, the Crop tool is used to select what I want to keep of the original photo, and that should be most of it. Generally the errant finger is at the top of the photo and covers no more than 5-6% of the vertical distance. When it is correctly selected, you hit the Enter key and the part outside the crop will now disappear. Now I go to the File Menu, and find the option to Overwrite the original file, and when I do this, a pop-up window appears and I click Export. The last step is to go back into digikam, and click the Refresh option in the View menu (or F5 will do the same thing). This will cause digikam to reread the files from the hard drive. I find the file I changed in the Thumbnails, Click the Preview, and make sure it is the way that I want it. If it is, I can then resume scanning the photos using the arrow key until I find another one that I need to fix.

But what if you don’t like the change and want another shot at it? Well, I have not as yet discarded my work in GIMP. I can go back to GIMP, and use Ctrl+Z to get back the original before my crop operation. I don’t discard my work in GIMP until am ready to work on a new photo. Of course, you could also back up all of your originals into a separate archive before you start work, but this works well enough for me. When I get to the next photo, I start in GIMP by going to File–>Close to get rid of the previous photo, then open the new one and continue.

Red Eye

I think we’ve all seen this in a few of our photos. It is when the pupils of the subject’s eyes appear bright red, giving them a rather satanic appearance. The cause of this, in short, is light bouncing off the retina in the back of the eye which is rich in blood vessels, hence the bright redness. This is most often observed in photos taken with a flash since the light hits the eye and bounces back faster than the pupil can adjust. But how to you get rid of it? There are a number of ways, but here are some fairly simple ways to do this.

For low-res photos:

  1. First, load the photo in GIMP.
  2. Then Zoom in to an eye that is red until you see the individual pixels as squares.
  3. Use the Color Selector to make sure your selected color is black.
  4. Select the Paintbrush Tool, and reduce the size. If I can see individual pixels I set the size to 1.
  5. Paint out the red eye color by clicking on the individual pixels. You will click on each pixel several times since it does not go to pure black right away. This is good since it lets you blend the pixels.
  6. Repeat for any other eyes in the photo that are red.
  7. Export the finished photo when you are done.

For high-res photos

  1. First, load the photo in GIMP.
  2. Zoom in until the red spot is 3-4 centimeters across. If this is a high-res photo, you should not see any discernible pixels.
  3. Use the Ellipse Select tool to select the red area. Go just a little beyond the red area to make sure there is no red unselected. If the eye is partially closed so that you don’t have a fully round pupil, you should use the Free Select tool instead, and click around the area to make a dotted line that encloses it.
  4. Go to Filters–>Enhance–>Red Eye Removal–>OK
  5. If you find that the result is good for getting rid of the red, but there is still some blue or white in the pupil, go to the Colors Menu –> Colorize, and turn down the Lightness and Saturation.

Photo Artifacts

Sometimes a photo has an artifact, which can be caused by a speck of dust, or something wrong with the negative. I have a photo of my wife that has a little white streak on her eyelid that looks like damage to the negative. This is pretty easy to fix as well

  1. First, load the photo in GIMP.
  2. Zoom in to the spot that needs to be fixed.
  3. Go to Tools–>Paint Tools–>Heal. This tool lets you grab pixels from a different part of the picture and paint them over an area. A key thing to keep in mind is the pixels being grabbed are in relationship to what you are painting, so that if you start by grabbing pixels 3 centimeters to the right of where you are painting, as you paint the area being grabbed also moves the same way to keep that 3 centimeters distance. That can cause you to paint something you didn’t intend. If that happens, just release the tool and and start again.
  4. Make sure you have your Tool Option dialog open so you can control the brush size, etc.
  5. Set the brush size to something like 15-20. You can try different sizes to see how it works for you.
  6. Control+Click in the area you want to grab pixels from.
  7. Paint the area you want to heal. You should see the pixels change as you paint over them.
  8. Repeat as needed until you have a picture you like.
  9. For a more detailed look at how to use the Heal tool, try the Davies Media video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VcthL001Uc.
  10. And by the way, that photo of my wife now looks much better. I also corrected some red eye in the photo, because photos often have several things to be corrected.

With a little practice you will find you can use these tools quite easily to improve some of these issues in your photos.

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