Painting in color. Sounds like a pretty straight forward exercise. Pick a brush, pick a color and away you go. Well not so fast! In this tip I'll show you a clever way to retouch an image without using the clone tool, healing brush or the patch tool! To begin with we'll start with an image that would prove difficult to repair. Meet Guapo the cat...

Zooming in closer on the image we can see that there is a lot of discoloration to the cat's fur. This is caused by reflections in the window. Traditionally to remedy the situation a Polarizing filter would be used on the camera to remove the reflections. No such luck with a point and shoot digital camera! Photoshop to the rescue. Removing the discoloration with Photoshop's traditional retouching tools would prove difficult with this image because of the texture of the fur.

Since the fur is primarily all grey, the next step is to sample a fairly neutral grey color using the eyedropper.

The next key step in this process is to go to the Bush Options in the tool bar. The default mode to paint with is "Normal". Pull down in the list and choose the "Color" option. This will let color information be transferred through the brush with no actual change in density.

Now begin to paint away all the dicoloration on the cat's fur. If the color doesn't seem right, simply undo and sample a new color from a different part of the image. Some trial and error will be required until you get just the right color!

For even more control and subtlety try this. Instead of painting directly on the image, first create a new empty Layer and change its blend mode to "Color". Make sure you set your brush's blend mode back to normal in the tool bar. By using a Layer you have much more creative control as you can vary the opacity of the Layer if the color is too strong!

The finished image below. Guapo is now a grey cat again and the relections have been lessened considerably and almost completely removed!

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