Chapter 8

How to Fix Problems

And There Will Be Problems. With Your Images. Not with Photoshop. Well, Hopefully

The human eye is an amazing thing—capable of viewing an incredible range of light, unless of course, you get a tiny eyelash in your eye. Then, not only your eye, but your entire being, becomes fixated on getting this tiny eyelash out, and you basically are paralyzed and unable to do anything else during this time, even though you have another perfectly functioning eye sans the eyelash. You’d think that something as thin as a hair would not be able to stop a 6' tall, moving, breathing miracle of science, but one tiny eyelash, and basically “the jig is up.” Now, let’s compare that to the sensor in your camera, which cannot capture nearly as wide a range as your eye can. Take an eyelash—heck, take 10 eyelashes—and put them on your lens and see what happens. Nobody cares. You brush them away and keep shooting. This is why we have so many problems caused by either our lenses or our eyes, or our sensors, or the stray eyelash or two. It’s kind of like the Death Star—here’s this giant planet-sized space station/weapon, but there’s this one little spot where, if you hit it with as much as an Airsoft pellet, it takes the whole thing down. It’s the Galactic Empire’s version of an eyelash in the eye (and we know how things spiral down from there). Anyway, because of this discrepancy between what your eye sees, and what your sensor captures, you’ll have to deal with problems from time to time, and Photoshop is the tool to fix these issues. It actually would have been helpful for hiding a small thermal exhaust port that would later be targeted by a trio of Y-Wings from Red Squadron, and well, let’s just say that it all could have been avoided by using the Clone Stamp tool. Just sayin’.