Remove stains in one click

Using a scanner to archive old photos can be a rewarding experience. You bring your old snapshots into the digital age, and you get the chance to fix them too. Image editing software like Photoshop and The Gimp have a lot to offer, including cropping, straightening, improving the color saturation and brightness of an image, and more. In this article, we’ll discuss using the Heal Selection tool in The Gimp to remove small (and sometimes large) imperfections like scratches, specks from dust on the scanner bed, and other blemishes.

Note: You can also use this tool on Windows, but you will need to install the GIMP Resynthesizer plugin first.

The first thing you need is an image to work with. For our examples, we’re going to use a cover image of a book that was definitely not in pristine condition. It had clearly been read and the front cover was bent over quite a bit, resulting in a line where the cover image had peeled off, for lack of a better term. Here’s a close-up of an area we’re trying to repair.