Master the Healing and Clone tools
The Clone Stamp tool and Healing brushes are the go-to tools for much restoration work – or indeed all kinds of retouching tasks. There are two healing tools to choose from: the Spot Healing Brush and Healing brush. The Spot Healing Brush is usually the one to start with. It works by automatically sampling from the surrounding image in order to fix the area being painted. As such, it’s brilliant for removing the little spots, marks, dirt, scratches and wrinkles that inevitably appear in old prints. Simply paint over them and let the tool do the work (for long scratches, shift- click between two points to paint a straight line).
As with all automated tools the Spot Healing Brush can occasionally go wrong, but this is when you can switch to either the Clone tool or Healing Brush to tidy up. Both of these other tools require you to Alt- click to sample a source – usually a clean area nearby. The Clone tool simply copies pixels from the source area to the painted area. It’s often most effective when used at a low opacity, as this allows you to gradually smooth out rough areas (to set a brush opacity quickly hit 1 for 10%, 2 for 20% and so on).
All these tools can be set to ‘Sample All Layers’. This is handy, as it means we can create a new empty layer above our original image then retouch on this layer, thereby preserving the original image on the layer below if we ever need to go back to it.