One of the wonderful blessings of digital photography is the ability to repair torn photographs. With an inexpensive scanner and a simple image processing program, a lot can be done. The wedding photograph below is an example.
Original
This photo was brought to me by a friend, asking if I could fix it. I scanned it on a flatbed scanner and went to work. Using Adobe Photoshop 4.0 LE (which comes bundled free with a number of printers and scanners), I used the CLONE tool to repair the damage.
Repaired
This is the result. When using the CLONE tool, you select one area of a photo and take those "cloned" pixels and put them in another area of the photograph. In this photo, I took pixels from undamaged areas and put them over the damaged areas. Undamaged wall was used to cover damaged wall. Undamaged carpet was used to cover damaged carpet. I used a large "brush" to repair these areas.
Closeup
This is a closeup of the central area of both of the above photos. You can see how the tear has been repaired. When using the CLONE tool, the size of the brush determines how many pixels are moved. When repairing areas with fine detail like a face, or lace, a very small brush is used to move only a few pixels at a time.
(Note: The photo above was not taken by the author of this site.)
Added November 24, 1999
