Help pleas: How to blend two areas that are different shades or discolored?

For the future: it always saves you a lot of time and work to even out these differences before merging.

Hi there,

Will this piece be printed? Sometimes when something is printed, you will not actually see the flaw afterall - glowing pixels on a screen is different from ink on paper. Personally, I would print it to see what needs to be done.

THEN, I would start with the clone stamp tool... to copy and scatter the brighter texture areas into the darker areas. Remember you can use the clone stamp at a lower percentage also. You can also explore dodge and burn...and again at various percentages. I prefer soft brushes for this.

I hope this helps. 

GOOD LUCK! : )

-murphy

Try using content aware tool in small areas . It should blend nicely.

Hi David

2 suggestions:

The hard, manual one:

I would make a new layer and use the healing brush (set to sample all layers) to create extra material.

Using your screenshot as reference, I'd probably cover a rectangular area starting at the topleft of the U and going down to the sharp corner of sky trapped at the edge of the building.

This will result in a large patch that doesn't blend perfectly.

Next, I would make a layer mask.

To do that: Look at the bottom of the layers panel and click the icon that looks the most like a camera. It's an icon of a rectangle with a circle in it. (Added given you're a selfproclaimed newbie, please take no offence in case I'm overexplaining.)

On the mask, I'd use a gradient going from the bottom left to about two thirds up the top right of the new material we just made.

That will blend the luminosity of the original image with the newly created material, although it will still leave a muddled texture.

Then, merge the two layers together, and use the spot healing brush (not the healing brush, the spot healing brush) to fix areas that have a muddy texture.

The easy and fast one:

Make a selection of the area you want to fix. In this case, I'm assuming it would be a selection of the sky, without the any part of the letters "RS".

Next, go to main menu and choose "Select" > "Modify..." > "Contract Selection..."

Enter a value that works. (it will depend on the dimensions of the image what a good value would be.

You're aiming to disconnect the selection by at least one or two pixels from any element we don't want to change.

In this case: we want the sky area without the "white" line surrounding to the building and also without any part of the letters.

Then, hit "shift + backspace" or "shift + f5" or go to the main menu and select "Edit" > "Fill..."

In the pop-up menu, select "content-aware fill" on top, check "color adaptation", and set a "Normal" blend mode + 100% opacity.

This could fix the image in one go. bam. finished. 🙂

If there are some problem areas you can fix them using the spot healing brush.

Hope it helps.

Best of luck!

Assuming I wanted to adjust the right-hand side, I would select the lighter area that needs to be changed. Then I would copy the selection to a new layer and darken it, probably with Curves, until I got a good visual match between left and right sides. Then I would mask that new layer and use a soft brush on the mask to blend the edges between the new layer and the underlying layer, if necessary. 

Anything from using the patch tool to clone stamps with reduced opacity and blending modes to just painting over with conventional brushes using Color blending mode. Entirely depends on what your preferred look is. Also consider carefully using e.g. a Surface Blur to smooth out some of the more rough areas. Otherwise you can of course wear yourself out by digging into all sorts of tutorials on beautification and image restoration that explain techniques liek frequency separation and evening out splotchy colors.

Mylenium