Photo Restoration and Retouching
Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo by
Robert Correll
Creating Ads, Brochures, Whatever? Buy This Book!
Are you passionate about the photographs you take and want to give them
a professional look? Do you have boxes of old family pictures that you
want to restore? Or are you an avid scrapbooker looking to enhance your
projects? Photo Restoration and Retouching Using Corel® Paint Shop
Pro® Photo shows everyone how to use Paint Shop Pro Photos top-notch
editing tools to restore, enhance, and retouch their photographs. It doesnt
matter whether you are a serious photographer, an artist, a casual photo
hobbyist, an arts and crafts enthusiast, genealogist, or small business
owner-youll benefit from the techniques and practices shown in this book.
After a brief introduction to Paint Shop Pro Photo and other helpful topics
such as scanning and organizing, youll dive into more than 70 detailed
photo studies which showcase digital, scanned, color, and black-and-white
photos. Discover how to restore and retouch your pictures and make them

worthy of display in your home or office, in albums or in scrapbooks, as
you follow along with the studies, which use real life photos from the
authors collection. Each study teaches you how to tackle specific
problems, shows you the pros and cons of different techniques, and
concludes with the fully restored or retouched photo. The studies address
problems that range from small to large, including scratches, blemishes,
red eyes, fading, tears, missing pieces, color, lighting, contrast, and more.
Youll also learn how to retouch photos, including people and adding and
removing objects. Photo Restoration Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo will
show you how to enhance your already good photographs, teach you how
to analyze your pictures like a professional for the best possible finished
product, offer ways to tackle impossible photos, and conclude with artistic
retouching.
Personal Review: Photo Restoration and Retouching Using
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo by Robert Correll
A common lament among users of Corel's popular Paint Shop Pro series
of photo editing programs is the lack of advanced tutorial material. Over
time there have been a few professionally done video books and texts
offered here and there, and author Robert Correll himself has put together
two helpful video books based upon earlier versions of PSP, but in general
those efforts concentrate on developing basic to low-level intermediate
skills at best. Now Correll and Thomson Course Publishing (since become
Cengage Learning) have come forth with an advanced PSP tutorial that
goes well beyond the basics of photo repair titled Photo Restoration and
Retouching Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo.
In his new tutorial Correll (the similarity in names Correll/Corel is pure
coincidence) has assembled 73 photo projects, mostly casual photos of his
wife and children along with those of assorted kinfolk who were smiling into
the family cameras as far back as 1919. The color and black and white
photographs presented here have suffered a host of indignities over the
years; fading, overwriting and smudges of all kinds, scratches, tears and
holes in addition to the usual technical defects caused by bad film, poor
lighting or poor scanning techniques. There are, of course, the human
flaws as well; a pimple here and there, nose hair, dandruff - it's all here in
gory high resolution detail, and each Photo Study's source photo is made
available for download upon request to the author. I should add that Correll
makes himself readily accessible to his target audience via e-mail, keen on
cheering them on in their photo restoration efforts.
Basically each Photo Study begins with a brief background about the
subject(s) of the photo. Along the way you will meet the author and his wife
Anne and their four small children who are introduced in a light-hearted
fashion along with Uncle Jim and Grandpa Bud among others. Then the
problems in the photo at hand are pointed out, and Correll begins his
repair routine in a step-by-step fashion sometimes diverging to try
alternative means of solving the issues being confronted. A pre-release
version of PSPP X2 was used to do the repairs, but the included

screenshots are taken from PSPP XI. I am still using PSP X, and for the
most part had no problems following along though the capabilities of some
of the tools in my older version differ slightly from those in the more recent
PSPP X2. The Levels adjustment tool is one such example. The text and
screenshots are of excellent quality and printed in color on high-gloss
stock. My only niggle here is that my 73 year old eyes had difficulty
discerning the small text shown in many dialogue boxes, and even my
magnifying glass sometimes struggled to make out many of the dialogue
settings which are not always specified in the explanatory text.
In Photo Study One the author throws the reader off the leaning tower and
right into the heart of photo restoration and retouching with a very
challenging photo repair study of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I would have
preferred easing into things with a more merciful project, but so much for
whining. Perhaps Correll was trying to instill from the get-go a necessary
sense of patience and persistence which he emphasizes frequently while
stressing the need to be discriminating about one's work. He also cautions
a light touch that does not render restore operations obvious to the viewer.
One great advantage of the book for me was that I became acquainted
with several tools that I had, frankly, not previously employed in my photo
restore efforts since beginning to work with PSP about 6 or 7 months ago.
The Saturation Up/Down and the Lighten/Darken tools are just two such. I
was also introduced to the Displacement Map under the Effects menu.
This looks like an interesting Effects routine that I intend to explore further.
The final chapter of the book presents a few creative applications using
some of the Effects menu options, but frankly the author only scratches the
surface here, though his results are impressive. An imaginative author
could easily employ the PSP Effects tools in a tutorial presented solely
upon their own merits, and I am sure Mr. Correll would be the first to
agree.
In addition to the photo exercises, Correll offers interesting background
information about scanning photos, organizing and archiving them as well
as helpful printing tips. He also interjects along the way a few useful editing
tips and tricks that he has discovered through his personal experiences
using PSP.
Does the author leave anything left unsaid? Well, in a word, yes. Not every
tool and adjustment in the PSP arsenal is acknowledged its fifteen minutes
of fame, though all the heavyweights certainly are, but there is an appendix
to the book that does give a brief rundown of each and every tool.
However, there is no mention of the hidden tools to be found in the Unused
Commands section, some of which can be quite helpful in certain
circumstances. Plug-ins are not touched upon nor is the use of scripts,
even those pre-defined scripts included with PSP. The author has a
tendency to use the High Pass Sharpen adjustment as opposed to the
Unsharp Mask, but his reasons for this apparent preference are not stated.
He also likes to work with photos in .tif format as opposed to the more

common .jpg/.jpeg file format, but again reasons are not stated though I
presume they have something to do with a lesser likelihood of introducing
artifacts into a photo during the restoration/retouching process.
I personally would have liked to have seen Photo Studies that put to work
a few PSP capabilities that I am largely unfamiliar with. In this category I
would include the Hue Map tool, and a few exercises using the Create
Mask from Image procedure would have been a very welcome addition. In
fact, I would have liked to have seen a few more exercises using masks in
general though there are 3 of them. Masking, I think, is a weak point for
many, including even PSP buffs far more experienced than I am.
All in all, however, this is a powerful tutorial that ought to be a part of every
PSP enthusiast's personal library - it is a text that is sure to be referred to
again and again. It is my hope that Mr. Correll's tutorial does well in the
marketplace thereby launching further PSP instructional texts from this
very knowledgeable and photo-savvy author. In my book, Correll's tutorial,
Photo Restoration and Retouching Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo, gets
a well-deserved 5 stars.
For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price:
Photo Restoration and Retouching Using Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo by Robert Correll 5
Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price!