iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Painting Over Freckles, Scratches, and Hairs

Sometimes an otherwise perfect portrait is spoiled by the tiniest of imperfections—a stray hair or an unsightly blemish, for example. Professional photographers, whether working digitally or in a traditional darkroom, routinely remove such minor imperfections from their final prints—a process known as retouching, for clients known as self-conscious.

iPhoto’s Retouch brush lets you do the same thing with your own digital photos. You can paint away scratches, spots, hairs, or any other small flaws in your photos with a few quick strokes.

The operative word here is small. The Retouch brush can’t wipe out a big blob of spaghetti sauce on your son’s white shirt or completely erase somebody’s mustache. It’s intended for tiny fixups that don’t involve repainting whole sections of a photo. (For that kind of photo overhaul, you need a dedicated photo-editing program.)

The Retouch brush works its magic by blending together the colors in the tiny area that you’re fixing. It doesn’t cover the imperfections you’re trying to remove, but blurs them out by softly blending them into a small radius of surrounding pixels. You can see the effect in Figure 6-4.

Tip

The Retouch brush is particularly useful if your photo library contains traditional photographs that you’ve scanned in. You can use it to wipe away the dust specks and scratches that often appear on film negatives and prints, or those that are introduced when you scan the photos.

Figure 6-4. The key ...