PaintShop Pro is an easy-to-use application that has many many features
for amateur and professional photographers alike. In this tutorial we'll look at a number of
different ways in which you can remove objects from a photograph to enhance the image.
We'll cover the scratch remover, background eraser, clone tool,
the blemish fixer, magic fill and Smart Carver.
I'm going to start with this image and as you can see there's a fair amount of work to do on this image
but with the tools in PaintShop Pro we can do it in quick order.
I'm going to start with the Clone tool. The Clone tool is a popular tool in many photo editing applications
and does quite well at covering objects or areas with something else from the same image.
As an example if I select the Clone tool in my toolbox, I'll zoom into this area here
You'll notice that I have a small circle will look like a rubber stamp.
By right-clicking I can select my source area and then when I left-click I create my target.
It's going to take the content of the source area and move it into the target
so left-click and it's just simply a matter of painting. If I need to reset my source area,
I'll simply move my curser someplace else, right click and then left click to
continue painting. If by chance I make a mistake it's simply a matter of doing Ctrl+Z to undo.
Now I can also hold the Alt key down and this will
allow me to change the size of my nib. If I left click and drag my mouse
with the Alt key held down. I'm going to make my mouse a little bit smaller
and again, right-click my source and then left-click
to fill that in. I'm going to select my source up here
left click and start to fill this in. I'm going to continue removing these lines
and I'll be right back and show another feature within the application called Scratch Remover.
We're going to switch to the Scratch Remover tool.
The Scratch Remover tool was designed to remove scratches from damaged images
but it's also very effective at removing things like power lines, telephone poles
or pipes that are distracting in the image. I'll select the Scratch Remover tool.
Underneath the Clone tool we have the scratch remover and it works similarly to the Clone tool.
If I left-click and drag you can see that I have two outside lanes and a center lane.
Now the way this works is it takes the source area as the two outside lanes and
dumps it into the target area which is a center lane so simply a matter of left
clicking and dragging and very quickly remove the line for me. I can select this area along here
and if I use my page up and page down key that will allow me to change the width of these lanes.
It's simply a matter of dragging along the line that I want to remove.
Now we're going to take a look at the Background Eraser tool. The Background Eraser tool let's you selectively erase pixels.
I'll select the Background Eraser tool underneath the Eraser tool itself.
You'll find the Background Eraser here.
Erase the background simply by holding down the left mouse button and dragging around the area
that I want to erase. You'll note the black tip will erase whatever it touches.
For example, if I move my cursor inwards to the edge of the roof, the black tip will touch that and erase it.
Now it's a good idea to let go of the mouse button once in a while
so that if you do make a mistake, when you do a Ctrl+Z or an undo
it doesn't undo too much work. To get in this area I'm simply left clicking
and it will easily remove content from here. As you can see, the Background Eraser is very quick and easy to use.
Now I'm going to replace this background with another image.
On the right-hand side I'm going to mouse over top of my Layers palette and that will cause it
to slide out to and I'm going to push this pin in that will lock it into place.
In my Organizer tray at the bottom I'm going to drag this image, left click, bring it up into my Layers palette
You'll see it's quite a bit smaller, that's not a problem at all. I'm going to position
this in the bottom left hand corner, stretch it upwards and now simply a
matter of taking the image of the house and moving ahead of the cloud image.
That will then effectively replace the background. I can see a couple of areas that I missed.
I'm simply going to grab my Eraser tool and I can erase these objects easily.
Next we're going to take a look at the Blemish fixer. It's good for removing blemishes
but it's also good for removing small areas or imperfections in the image.
I'm going to open up this image and select the Makeover tools, which include blemish fixer,
toothbrush, eye whitener, sun tan and thinify.
I'm going to be using the Blemish Fixer. Zoom in to this area here.
My cursor is a large circle with a smaller circle in the center. This works very similar to the Scratch Remover
in that whatever's in the outside channel will be dumped into the inside channel.
With the Blemish Fixer I can hold the Alt key down
and change the size of my brush. Simply click and it will remove the object.
For this object I'm going to make my brush bigger and it's simply a matter of clicking in here
and it's removed that element for me.
I can very quickly go around the image and remove the elements that I don't want.
For the next image I'm going to use the Magic Fill.
Magic Fill is one very powerful tool but it's also very quick and easy to use.
I'll mask the area that I want to remove and simply click on my action icon on the toolbar.
In a matter of seconds it's going to take the clownfish, remove it from the area,
and backfill with the texture in behind.
I'll do a Ctrl+Z to remove my mask.
I'm going to do the same effect on another image
I can use the rectangular mask tool or I can use the freehand selection mask.
I'm going to use the freehand selection and draw a mask
around my subject and click on the action tool and we're done.
Ctrl-D will remove that mask and that's all there is to it.
In this final image we're going to use the Smart Carver to remove a person.
From the Image menu, I'm going to select Smart Carver.
This will bring up the Getting Started palette. There are a number of these in PaintShop Pro
and they basically give you a 1-2-3 approach on how to use a specific tool.
I'll click on Close. With my brush selected I'll paint over my subject,
making sure to get all of the elements that I want to remove from the image.
If there's a portion of the image that's close to an object I don't want to remove
I'm going to use my preserve paintbrush and mask an area to protect.
I'm going to click on auto-contract horizontally,
set my new dimension to 576, hit Enter,
return back into PaintShop Pro with the object removed from the image.
As you can see, there are a number of tools available in
PaintShop Pro that make it easy to remove objects, backgrounds, imperfections and fix up your photos.