Smudging
SmudgingOkay, this is probably the best way you can clean images. Through Smudging. When you smudge you take a particular color and spread it around the image. This makes it an effective cleaning tool because you can clean low DPI dots and all other what nots on your picture. It's easy and worth it.
Here is part of the image of my Little Mermaid layout before I cleaned it:
Step 1: Duplicate the Layer, so that you don't have to worry about saving etc. if you mess up. If the image is a .GIF file make sure the mode is on RGB color.
Step 2: Select the Smudge Tool. You can set the strength of the smudge depending on how much you need to do. I usually set it between 10-20% so that I don't mess up
Step 3: Now, zoom into the area you want to smudge and put your mouse over it. You don't HAVE to zoom, but depending on how much detail you want to go into, I recommend it.I'm going to zoom into Ariel's arm.
Step 4: Now. Start Smudging. This is the hard part, because move your mouse in the direction you want to smudge and with the shadows. Since I'm cleaning the light peach part of her arm Im going to go down with all the other light peach. Not sideways. The first image is me going down and smudging and the other is side to side. The second is wrong because it throws off the coloring and goes into the dark peach- messing up the gradient/coloring of her arm.
Step 5: Since I'm still focusing on the arm I'm going to continue with the light peach going down (and not touch the other colors on the side-- the darker shades of peach) and finish cleaning that part.
Step 6: Likewise, I'm going to use the other shades on the left and one by one pull the smudge tool down. The thing with smudging shades is that you have to decide how many shades you want to concentrate on. For the arm I'm concentrating on 3. So you see three shades of clean lines on this arm.
Step 7: Finally, we use the smudge tool, on low strength, and take the sides of the different colors and smudge them together so they fom a gradient, like a clean image would.
Step 8: Continue doing the same thing with the rest of the picture. Remember to smudge the same shades and not to, for example start smudging the peach of her skin then move the mouse . It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. This is the image of the little mermaid after I finished cleaning it with the smudge tool. See the difference?
Quick Note: If you are smudging, the best way to save an image is NOT a .gif file because many times gif files catch small mistakes and the image will become spotted. If you want, you can save it as a .jpg FIRST and then a high quality gif file. See how the image on the bottom as a .gif, the same file is a little more unclear than the top .jpg one.
