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A month or so ago, some good friends of mine
from Oregon (hey Brent and Karon!) visited. As they had just
received Photoshop but hadn't really played with it too long, I
offered to help them get going. I must admit, I didn't do it
entirely for selfless reasons. Fact is, there are entirely too
few Photoshop geeks in the Great Northwest, and I was getting a
bit lonely! So in the interest of propagating Photoshop Geekdom
here in the mountains, I set out to create 2 Lukes to my Yoda.
Being one of a scarce few actually Photoshopping
up here, I'm fairly busy. As a result, my young charges have
been rather clever in dissecting areas of Photoshop 7 that I've
yet to touch. Brent mentioned the Patch Tool in a phone
conversation the other night and started talking about moving
skyscrapers around in a photo… so I had to try it.
The patch tool operates on a premise similar to
the clone tool, but with patch you can actually make a selection
of an area to use as your patch, and drag it to the area to be
corrected. When you make your selection you can then adjust the
feather and so forth to blend the edges a bit more seamlessly,
and the patch automatically adjusts the lighting/shading for the
best match of the area being fixed.
Ok, enough techno talk. What can this thing
really do?
To start, let's open a picture of many faces. Here's one of 3
ladies… let's see if we can't create triplets.
Select the Patch Tool from the toolbar.
In the options bar, you will see a couple of
radial buttons that allow you to set the patch selection you are
about to make as the source or destination. Let's set it to
source for this run.
Pick a face, any face. Draw your selection
around the perimeter.
Now go to Select>Feather, and put in a setting
of 2 or so.
You should now have a selection around the area
you want to patch..
Now this part may seem a bit confusing… it was
for this old man anyway. Though we set it to source, what
actually happens is we drag the selection to another face, and
the face we dragged it to is pasted into the original selection.
Now when we choose ‘destination' and drag the
selection, the face in the selection is pasted to the new area:
Looky there… Triplets! |