My father-in-law took many, many travel photos with his point-and-shoot digital camera. At some point, it looks like his sensor got some dirt on it, and from then on there was a dark area in his images. It's most noticeable in the sky or other light area. It's not black and well-defined, but hazy.

I had him take a picture of snow, so that the spot would be the only dark thing in the image, and it's attached.

It seems to me that some kind of mask could be made of the spot that would lighten that area of the image, no matter which image I put under it, so I could apply it to all of them. Being new at this, I'm not sure how to make such a mask (in Elements 4.0 with Richard's power tools).

Any (step-by-step) help would be greatly appreciated!

Will

You don't need a mask. Use the Healing tool. If you have my book ( http://aps8.com/taplb.html ) it goes into detial about this. Or try the Elements Help. Essentially you:

1. choose the tool (press J). Be sure the sample is set to Sample All Layers
2. Open your image
3. Create a sample (hold Option/Alt [mac/PC] and click on the area you want to use to replace; release the key)
4. Apply the sample (click the tool over the damage and cover the whole spot).

OK?

Richard

Thanks (and I have three editions of your books!).

That will work fine on this "demo" image, but he has a slew of images with dark spots on everything from buildings to people to elephants. I was hoping I could set up a layer that would lighten the dark spot on any one of those images, so I could just run through them all quickly.

As I imagine it, I would somehow invert the black and white, so that all of the layer would be black except for the spot, and then make the spot transparent. Then I could slap this over any of his images and lighten up the transparent area (the spot on the layer below).

Would that work?

Cheers,

Will

You are going to have to do that manually I'm afraid. Thats UNLESS the dark spots are in the same place on every image. It can happen if it is lets say bacon sandwich on the lens. Then Camera RAW in CS3 can help you out, it allows you to spot heal multiple images with one click

The dirt is on the sensor, so the spot is exactly the same, in the same spot, in every image.

I'm not running Photoshop CS. I do have the Adobe Camera RAW utility. Will that do it? These images are jpegs, not RAW. I'm not sure whether that makes a difference, either.

Is there a command or tool that switches black to white and white to black in a B&W image?

Thanks,

=W=

"I'm not running Photoshop CS" - what are you running then?

The original post indicated that he is using Photoshop Elements 4.0.

There is a filter to invert the density of images and it works on B&W as long as the mode is RGB. I don't have PSE4 anymore but on my PSE6 it is under
Filters>Adjustments>Invert
It may be in a different place but I remember that PSE4 had this capability.

Cobalt

Thanks for the menu path; it's the same in v4.

I succeeded in making a layer that does what I want. Basically, I resized the sample my father-in-law sent me by email to the native size JPGs his camera outputs, inverted his image with a white background so that the spot was white, increased the contrast, painted black over miscellaneous light-speckled areas, and put one of my father-in-law’s images as a layer beneath it. I set the dark layer to screen at 38% opacity.

Not perfect, but looks pretty good. Here’s the spot-removal layer (set to normal and opaque so it’s visible), one of the original photos, and the result after lightening the spot and applying Richard’s dynamic duo.

Will

Well, this only works when the spot needs to be whitened, so it works in a cloudy sky.

Is there a way to make part of an image (a fuzzy spot) transparent? I did it with a pure black fuzzy spot on pure white, but the whole image of the spot on the snow is various shades of gray.