Photo Blend, Split and Straighten in Paint by Zaweba

Three jobs that come up again and again with family and everyday photos share a home in Paint by Zaweba. Photo Blend Layers combines the best parts of several near-identical shots. Split and Straighten Photos turns one flatbed scan of several prints into separate, upright pictures. Auto Straighten levels a picture that came out tilted.

Photo Blend Layers

Take five shots of a group and someone is blinking in each one. Photo Blend Layers is made for that. Put the shots in one document as layers and run it. It aligns the shots so they line up, keeps the base layer as it is, and gives every other layer a hide-all mask. A hide-all mask hides the whole layer, so at first you see only the base picture.

Then you paint areas in. Pick a layer where someone's eyes are open, paint white on its mask over their face, and that face from the other shot appears in place of the blink. Do the same for each problem: a turned head, a passer-by, a child pulling a face.

Choose the best overall shot as the base, so you have the least to fix. Use a soft brush on the masks so the edges blend. Watch for things that cross the boundary of your painted area, such as an arm or a shoulder that moved between shots, and include them in the painted area or leave them out entirely.

The same method handles more than faces. Remove tourists from a landmark by painting in areas from shots where they had moved on, or combine the best splash from a series of water shots.

Split and Straighten Photos

Scanning old prints one at a time is slow. File > Automate > Split and Straighten Photos lets you lay several prints on the scanner glass at once, scan them as one image, and then splits that scan into separate documents, one for each print, each turned upright.

For the best result, leave a gap between the prints so the edges can be found, and use a plain lid or a sheet of contrasting paper behind them. Prints with white borders on a white background are harder to separate, so a dark sheet behind them helps.

Once split, each print is its own document, ready for Fade Correction, dust cleanup and saving.

Auto Straighten

A sloping horizon is one of the most common faults in snapshots. Auto Straighten levels a tilted picture using Hough lines, a method that finds the strong straight lines in an image, such as horizons, walls, door frames and table edges, and works out the angle that makes them level or upright.

It works best on pictures with clear straight lines. On a scene with no obvious lines, such as a forest or a close-up of a face, there is nothing for it to measure, and straightening by hand will be more reliable.

Straightening rotates the picture, which leaves empty corners. Crop afterwards to tidy the edges, or fill the corners if you need to keep the full frame.

A typical afternoon with old photos

These tools fit together well for a family archive. Scan several prints at once and use Split and Straighten Photos. Run Fade Correction on the faded ones. Clean up dust and tears with the retouching brushes. Use Colourise with Hints if you want to add colour to a black and white print. For recent group photos, Photo Blend Layers fixes the blinks.

All of this runs on your own computer in Paint by Zaweba, so private family pictures never go anywhere they shouldn't.