Get the Image You Want: Essential Photoshop Editing Techniques

Repair and edit your images with the Patch tool

So you're searching through your image files for a few shots to use as a background photo for a project. You find what you're looking for, a tree backlit by the late afternoon sun, but it isn't quite perfect given that it doesn't have many leaves. Using Photoshop's Patch tool, you can enhance a setup that nature may have shortchanged and make it look just as you think it should. A few minutes with the Patch tool might save you the expense of another shoot or an online stock shot.

Practice, practice

1.	Open a practice image that has good color contrast and well-textured areas, such as the one shown in Figure A. Figure A.
2.	Make a duplicate layer of your original image by selecting Duplicate Layer ...