Correction.

Exercise: Correction.

This picture was made from a scanned in negative that was taken some thirty odd years ago and features my daughter.  There is a flaw in the area of her fingers which looks like some sort of contamination on the negative.  There is also a small blemish in the greenery above her head.

For the hand blemish I employed the cloning tool in Photoshop and changed the blemish one pixel at a time.  The result is perfect.  There is now no sign of the mark.  For the Blemish in the greenery I used a soft clone brush and blended in the area.

The lens flare image is one I took at Botany Bay, Kent a few weeks ago.  The flare is visible in the left side of the picture as a round pale area.  I tried to change the density of the flare but found it also had a green tint that made it still visible.  I reverted to the clone tool and painted in the details from the surrounding areas, finally restoring the horizontal lines.  An acceptable result at normal viewing resolution.

The changes made to the picture of my daughter have not in any way changed the reality of the image but have in fact removed items that were not there at the taking of it.  When working on old negatives this is a constant chore but one that must be done to make them usable.

The removal of the lens flare from this image I believe to be acceptable.  The flare added nothing to the composition and was not there to the naked eye at the time.  Had it added something to the image, like completing an implied triangle, I may have left it in but in this case it had to go.