A few weeks ago I had a very big problem with the 400+ photos I had taken during a photo session. The photos seemed fine as I was chimping with the camera’s tiny LCD screen. After the shoot, however, I loaded the photos onto the computer and was horrified to find that all of the photos were covered in nasty little blotches. A LOT of nasty little blotches. Since I am religious about cleaning my lenses with a microfiber cloth, I could only conclude that the evil was inside my camera. I cleaned the sensor immediately with the rubber-bulbed air blower, but I was still stuck with a batch of spotted photos.

What to do? Help me, Photoshop, help see the way! Let me record an action to remove all the garbage while I go sit on the couch and read this James Ellroy novel!

Photoshop, however, was having none of it. For splotches, stains, pimples, moles, blackheads, burnt pixels, stray hairs, scratches and other offensive detritus, I usually use the Spot Healing Tool in CS2, moving to the more accurate Clone Stamp Tool if the splotch is too close to a background of a vastly different color or texture. Unfortunately, CS2 will not let you automate the Spot Healing or Clone Stamp Tools. What you can automate, however, are selections. So here’s what you can do:

1) In your Actions pallet, hit the button to create a new action. Name it. Hit Record.

2) Using the Lasso Tool, go to each little black dot and circle it, making sure that you are enclosing the entire splotch but no more. Since you’re trying to fix a large batch of different photos, accuracy is important in this step. This is a laborious process, but remember that you can toggle between Add to Selection and Subtract from Selection with the Alt key. Make sure, though, that you are adding to the selection every time you start on a new blotch, not subtracting from or replacing the selections you’ve already made.

3) Choose Filter > Noise > Dust and Scratches. Use the slider to choose a radius that dissolves the spot. In my case it took a radius of 29 to eliminate the blotch completely.

4) But now we have a problem. The area is now so smooth that it sticks out obtrusively. We need some texture. Choose Filter > Noise > Add noise (Distribution: Gaussian, and Monochromatic checked) to make the spot look less uniform. Use the slider to match the noise texture to that of the surrounding area. In my case I needed .4%.

Stop your action. Now you can Automate > Batch the whole action for a group of photos. Choose your action from the batch dialog, select your Source folder. Click “Suppress File Open Options Dialogs” if you are automating RAW photos (remember that if you have altered these previously either in the RAW dialog box and clicked “Done” or applied a saved setting to them in Adobe Bridge that those settings will be maintained in the batch processing). Choose your Destination folder. I always keep a generic Destination folder called “AUTOMATIC PHOTOS” where I put all my automated batch photos. That way any action I create will always save to that file, so I can go back and use those actions later without errors with the Save command.

Remember also that if you are shooting photos in portrait format (i.e. vertical frame), and then take a few in landscape format (i.e. horizontal frame), then the spots will not match up in exactly the same place on the photos. If you have selected the blotches in portrait format, you’ll need to rotate the landscapes appropriately and do one of the following:

1) Separate the landscapes from the portraits and run them with a different action whose first step will be Image > Rotate Canvas > 90° CCW (or CW, depending on how you held your camera in portrait format, but I always shoot with my right hand on top), and the last step (before your Save and Close actions) will be to rotate it back to normal with Image > Rotate Canvas > 90° CW.

2) Probably the easier option is to choose all the landscapes in Adobe Bridge, rotate them before batch processing, and then rotate the JPGs back to normal again when you’ve finished processing.

I’ve posted the action so you can see what I’m doing. You can download it here. Obviously this will not fix your photos because your smudges will not be in the same places. It’s just so you’ll have a concrete example of what I’m doing. I always like it when people post actions, settings or PSD files to download. Sure, explanations are great, screenshots are great, but you could really get away with a lot less if you just posted the file directly.

If you’ve never loaded action before, just click on the side button of your Actions pallet and choose Load Action.

Note that this is not a panacea for your splotchy photo ills. You will still have to go back and fix photos (using the Spot Healing or Clone Stamp Tools) where the Dust and Scratches filter has blurred textures like clothing and hair, leaving equally annoying blotches. If you have more time and patience, instead of batch processing you can open the photos individually, run the action and analyze the damage done at the moment. That way you can use the History Brush to wipe away the new Dust and Scratches blotches and fix them with the Spot Healing or the Clone Stamp Tools.

High Dynamic Range imaging. You know, funky clouds.

Chris Wage recently got me interested in HDR with his incredible photos of Nashville buildings backed by massive expanses of sky filled with — yes indeed, funky clouds.

In fact, by looking at his photos, one might think that Nashville was one massive landscape filled with red-and-purple tinged cumulus monstrosities. But no, it is actually a massive landscape filled with faux cowboys, shopping malls and roadside titty bars. Alas, Chris’s Nashville is nothing more than a trick by a clever photographer armed with esoteric computer software!

I decided to get in on this racket. I was just interrogating Chris on his methods when I noticed that outside of my own home there was something akin to noontime darkness. Now, we definitely don’t have clouds in Barcelona. Maybe one. I think I’ve seen it around once or twice.

So imagine my surprise to find that the sky was in fact full of sweet grayness, perfect for taking my first real HDR photos!

Now, these clouds had a gruel-like consistency which were nothing like the textured and fluffy ones Chris has enshrined. But I had faith in the cabala algorithms of the computer software to make everything funky with the push of a button or two, and I continued on with my mission.

I walked down the block to the Sagrada Familia cathedral and pushed all the blond people speaking in tongues out of the way so I could get the 3 exposure-bracketed photos necessary to make my HDR masterpiece. I set up my tripod, crouched on the ground, and soon filled up a 1GB CF card with spires and wimpy clouds.

Incidentally, there is a little known side effect to clouds in the sky, a phenomenon called “rain” which apparently can sometimes interrupt extended HDR sessions. This was the case today, and as I had neglected to bring the camera bag, I walked back to the house with the camera under my shirt.

The scene continued as follows:

“All right, Photoshop, I’ll make a sandwich while you’re fixing up all my photos real purty! What, Photoshop, what is all this blurriness around the edges? This is not HDR as I’ve seen it!”

Photoshop did not deign to reply.

I didn’t blame Photoshop for the poor results of my half-hour of work. I blamed all the people who had a part in inventing HDR. It was obviously a flawed concept from the get-go, and it’s just like those spineless lackeys to keep yessirring bad ideas just to get their names up on the big board.

Anyways, so this isn’t an HDR photo. It’s just one of the photos I chose from the umpteen gazillion that my camera took in the space of about five minutes, retouched a bit in Photoshop.

A Chinese seafood platter and a girl with a great smile. What else could a man ask for?

a) More soy sauce

b) Antacid

c) Simulated cross-processing with curves in Photoshop

d) Two girls with great smiles

This is from a shoot I did with Emma, an actress in Berlin. We did the session in the apartment of a filmmaker friend of mine who was checked into a mental institution at the time (ach, Berlin, Berlin, so gemein). He had all of these weird props and posters lying around that we made use of in the other shots.

The bathroom where this photo was taken didn’t have a window, and I didn’t have any studio lights or even an external flash at the time. On the bright side (haha) I was shooting on black-and-white film, meaning color temperature didn’t matter too much. So I took all of the tungsten lamps in the house and a fluorescent light panel I found in the attic and practically balanced them on the edge of the bathtub to get enough light on her face. Yes, in order to capture the perfect photo, there is no risk that I’m not willing to take — with the life of the model. We later climbed onto the roof of the seven-story apartment building and took photos of her on the edge pretending to jump off. Why do these ideas only occur to a person while living in Berlin?

One thing I dislike about all the old film photos I’ve digitalized is that before you even start retouching, you have to heal tons of scratches, dirt and burnt pixels. Camera, film, or the lab that digitalized them? I suggest it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. Long live digital SLR, says I.

Added some vignetting with three separate layers of black gradients (one for the top, one for the left side and a circular one in the center) to compensate for the unbalanced lighting situation. Adjusted the opacity of the layers, added grain to the gradients, flattened, fixed brightness/contrast, then burned and dodged a bit.

Interestingly, I wiped out the lines under her eyes with the clone tool (a typical first step in retouching portraits) but found that the softness detracted from the tough look on her face, so in the end I left them as they were.

A candid shot while we were waiting on friends to go to a disco. I’ve always been fascinated by how painters achieve chromatic balance in their works by limiting the colors in their pallet. I did the same here in Photoshop, forcing a pallet of colors of my choosing by using the Indexed Color mode and then converting back to RGB.