PS CS4: What's New — Retouching Tools

I've always made great use of the Clone, Heal, Sponge, Dodge, and Burn Tools and the excellent news is that they have all seen major upgrades moving from CS3 to CS4 — their functionality has been greatly improved.

The Clone and Heal Tools

Although we'll be covering only the Clone Stamp Tool, the same stuff applies to the Healing Tools.

What I want to do here is clone that red thing on the boat, circled in yellow, that you tie ropes to and stuff (there's an appropriate nautical term here which escapes me at the moment), and duplicate it to the left — see green arrow in the inset.

OK, the first thing to do is press the S key (or click on the icon circled in red) to bring up the Clone Stamp Tool.

We also want to bring up the Clone Source Panel to take a look at some options, so click the icon circled in blue at the top in the Options bar.

To get the latest and greatest enhancements, make sure the Clone Overlay and Clipped checkboxes are checked (circled in green). What this will do is create a preview of what will be cloned within the brush tip itself — a truly welcome and excellent improvement (see below).

Also, circled in purple, is a drop down menu which will give you four mode options for the cloning. We'll take a look at that, below.

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As promised, the mode options: Normal, Darken, Lighten, and Difference.

You'll need to experiment with all of these because the nature of what you're cloning — and what you'll be cloning onto — varies from image to image, and some of these modes are of much more value than others.

Closely inspect the screen shots for all four of these modes to get a better idea about what they do.

Normal

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For this image, I finally settled on Lighten (or maybe it was Darken, I can't remember). Anyway, the alignment was flawless and now the boat has another red thingy you tie ropes to and stuff.

What can I say? The genius switch doesn't have an off position!

Mr. Sponge Tool

Can I just say that I love the Sponge Tool? And now, with CS4, it's become even...spongier. There's just one big caveat, though.

You can find Vibrance settings in both Camera Raw and Lightroom. It works like this: if you increase or decrease the Vibrance, it increases or decreases the saturation of the colors in your image, but not all the colors. It affects only those colors that were fairly washed out or mellow to begin with and leaves alone the colors that were already pretty saturated. Cool, huh? Yes. Cool.

Select the Sponge Tool (found under the Dodge Tool) and you'll have the Vibrance option. However, the Vibrance checkbox in the Sponge Tool (found near the top in the Options bar) doesn't really work the way all the other Vibrance tools seem to work. Check out the images, below, and you'll see what I mean.

In the image, above, Saturate was on. With the Vibrance turned on, only the mellower colors (the tanish pebbles) should have been saturated. However, the whole derned thing got saturated. Not only that, it got saturated to a greater degree than when the Vibrance was turned off! Exactly what is not supposed to happen! Be careful.

The Desaturate mode works much better. As you can see, with Vibrance on (mellow colors only), the saturated blues saw little to no desaturation while the tan pebbles got very desaturated. Conversely, with Vibrance off (global desaturation), they all got desaturated, as they should.

I guess today's lesson is — if you're going to saturate with the Sponge Tool, don't turn on the Vibrance. And if you're going to desaturate, turn it on or off depending on which colors you want to hit.

Dodge and Burn Tools

I've regularly used these tools for darkening and lightening selective areas, but they have been trouble sometimes. I found that using either, I needed to be real careful about not overdoing it — which was easier said than done. With the Burn Tool especially I found that, yes, you do get the darkening, but colors could rapidly become oversaturated producing a fake look.

Anyway, with CS4, these tools now have a Protect Tones checkbox which was specifically designed to address these problems.

Here's the original and what I'll attempt to do is slightly darken my lovely daughter's left cheek.

And here's the result without using the Protect Tones function.

And the result with.

Whew! Pretty subtle, n'est pas? The original images show a little bit more of a difference than I can show here, but even at that, the result was almost imperceptible.

My impression is that this Protect Tones thing will be useful for professional photographers who get paid amazing amounts of money to make models look perfect (you know, something that doesn't actually exist). Anyway, in that world even the slightest of differences can mean getting paid or not. I guess.