Brighten a photograph and fill in a speck

Select a photograph, open the Design tab and look for its three headers: Place, Adjust and Retouch. One is open at a time. A closed header says what has been done inside it (cropped, flipped, a background to take off), so putting it away does not hide anything.

Tone

Press Adjust, and Tone has three controls, worked the way light behaves.

• Exposure, in stops. One stop is twice the light. It is worked out on the light itself, not on the 0 to 255 levels in the file, because those are not linear: half a stop on a mid grey done properly looks brighter, and done on the levels it looks washed out.
• Grey point. Click something in the picture that is grey in life, such as a pavement, a wall in shade or a grey card somebody held up. The whole photograph is balanced so that point comes out neutral. A point that is nearly black, has a channel blown out to white, or is plainly a colour is refused, and the panel says which. Clear the grey point takes it off.
• Contrast. Shadows go darker and highlights lighter, or the other way, while black, white and mid grey stay put.

Reset tone puts the photograph back as it arrived. Every render starts from the original file, so nothing is lost, and Undo takes the settings back too.

Three things to know:

• It is the photograph, not the type. Tone is applied to the picture before lettering and shapes are drawn over it, so a brand colour typed for a caption is the colour that prints, at any exposure.
• Clipping is said out loud. Brightening pushes the lightest parts past white, and past white there is nothing left to print. The panel gives the share of the picture that went, because a preview the size of a postcard will not show it.
• It says what it did: brightened half a stop, warmed to the grey you picked, contrast raised. It does not say the photograph was improved, because every pixel is the same pixel with its light moved.

Fill in: a speck, a hair, a wire

Press Retouch. Fill in says what it is for: specks, dust, hairs and wires.

1. Press Brush over it….
2. Paint over the mark with the round brush. A dab for a speck, as many strokes as a wire takes.
3. Press Use this selection, then Fill in.

Each pixel under the brush is worked out from the pixels round the edge of what you painted, so a speck on sky becomes sky and a wire across a wall becomes wall. Nothing is copied from anywhere else in the photograph.

It reaches about twenty-four pixels across. A mark wider than that is refused, in your unit, for example 0.31″ across; Fill in reaches 0.16″, because past that there is nothing near enough to work from and the result is a smear. Brush a thinner stroke, or fill a wide mark in narrower passes from its edges in. Take the last fill off takes one away, and so does Undo.

• It changes colours, never transparency. Only fully opaque pixels are filled, so the cut line comes back the same.
• It is a patch over your file. The original stays as it arrived.
• What it made is said everywhere: under the panel and on the hand-over, for example 0.4% of this piece is filled in from its edges, not from the photograph. It is a fact, never a reason to stop the job.

Remove the white background

Under Retouch, Remove the white background takes a flat white background off the picture. For a picture with a checkerboard painted into it, the button reads Remove the checkerboard. Where Studio finds neither, a line says so.