I recently had a situation where the bride had to have emergency surgery on her neck a few days before her wedding. She phoned me in a panick - very concerned that the large scar would ruin her pictures. I reassured her that I would be aware of the angles I shot at in order to hide it as much as possible - and then if a little cleaning up had to be done on her completed album and prints I would do so.

Fortunately on the day of her wedding, the bandaid used and a little makeup had camouflaged the scar so much so that it was hard to notice. But in the pictures it was still there and so probably 40 or 50 of the images had to be retouched. A wonderful PS tool for quickly dealing with these type of situations is the patch tool.

This was that bride. Although I tried to make sure that I shot as much as possible from a position that would hide the scar, it wasn't always possible with the hectic rate that I shoot at. Many shots like this may have been fine in the album as is, but with the patch took it took literally seconds to grab the scar area and patch it with surrounding skin texture. The closeup shows a very quick patch fix and how acceptable it is - nothing more was required to make the bride happy. Thank goodness for the Patch Tool which handled the fixes effortlessly and quickly - and provided near perfect results.

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Patch fix:

I thought you may have been the same person. I saw your post on ILP awhile ago.

Rob- I agree. The patch tool has saved me on more than one occasion. Just as an FYI, I have used it and the end result was more than what I had intended. I learned at a PS conference that RIGHT after you use the patch tool (before deselecting) if you go to the edit menu, you can select fade patch selection which allows you to adjust the percentage of patch effect. For instance if you want to de-emphasize laugh lines but don't want to eliminate them completely. You apply your patch tool, select edit, fade patch selection and drop it down to say 60%. You can also use the fade with filters as well. I don't know why Adobe doesn't feature that more prominently, It's great. Best to you.

Rob here from beautiful La Garita Costa Rica ( www.asifweknow.com )

Thanks Greg. I have known about the Fade for filters, but other than dabbling with it earlier in have never really utilized it. I will have to do that more for even better control.

For the next 2 months while I am away from home, I have to get used to a quite different approach to editing my images as I do not have Photoshop on my Macbook. I was hoping that Lightroom would do what I wanted, but that is not the case - - - and so I am attempting to get used to GIMP and it's functioning. Most of the PS tools are there - some aren't.

OK...gotta toss in my 2 cents...The healing tool, which the patch tool is part of, in my opinion should only be used on a duplicate layer. This goes for all adjustments. Then after you've patched or healed whatever, then you can adjust the opacity of the layer for the desired finished look.

Often when using the patch tool, I'll go over the edges with the healing tool, or even the air brush because it doesn't always make a perfect blend into the surrounding areas. I would think that for fixing a scar you would want 100%...For retouching wrinkles and lines and bags etc, I usually reduce the opacity to no more than 55%, and on older folks maybe 40 to 47% to keep it realistic.

OK...that's my 2 cents...
Aloha!