In this video I’m going to walk you through what I did for an advanced photo editing project using this photo called “nurse-advanced-editing.jpg.” I put it in the Heritage Practice Photos folder just in case you wanted to try your hand at it but it’s a pretty advanced project.

Many of the photo actions I use for routine photo editing are found in my Fix Photos FAST action set from my Actions–Fix Photos FAST class. This is true whether I’m editing photos from a digital camera or smart phone or whether I’m editing scanned heritage photos.

Almost every photo needs something whether it’s adjusting the lighting or sharpening or any other number of edits. And I have to say—I hear it a lot—people tell me they use the Fix Photos FAST actions on almost every photo, and I can understand that because I do too!

So my Fix Photos FAST actions are for ALL photos and my Heritage Photo Actions are specifically to deal with issues relating to scanned heritage photos. So let me walk you through what I did with this photo.

If I zoom in you can see the spots and other problems better. Remember I told you to sharpen before removing spots? Well, before I could sharpen I needed to fix the lighting so that’s what I did next using three actions from my Fix Photos FAST class:

Here’s the Lighter Less Contrast action reduced to 60% opacity followed by the Contrast action at 50% opacity. Then I used the Unsharp Mask Medium action.

Now I was ready to go back to my Heritage Photo Actions, run the Remove Spots action, and brush away the spots.

Here’s before…and after.

You can see that I sacrificed some detail on the lamp shade because there were just so many spots. But this photo had some other texture problems—other than just the spots. So I ran the Remove Spots action again and jacked up the Radius setting to smooth out the problem areas. Then I used a layer mask to paint in the effect only where I wanted it.

And finally I did some manual editing such as cloning, using the Spot Healing Brush, and Sharpening again but only applying it to specific areas.

Here’s the final photo. Is every detail perfect? No, but I made sure that the main focus of the photo—my mother-in-law as a young nurse—was as good as I could get it and nice and sharp to attract the attention. The background needs to be good enough to not be distracting but it doesn’t have to be a perfect rendition of the original room.

All of this does take time but I’m SO happy with the final result, and to me it was totally worth it!