Rotate Star

This procedure is an excellent way to repair stars that are normal  on one side but have some kind of problem on the opposite side. What we're going to do is clone the good side and rotate it to cover the bad side. Then we're going to clean up and blend the covered side so that all remnants of the problem disappear.

Before image:

Here we have a bright star. The top half looks pretty good but the bottom has an ugly looking blooming streak.

The first thing we want to do is zoom in on the star to make it easier to see what's going on. The easiest way to do this is with the zoom tool. The zoom tool resides in the Tools Window. If the Tools Window isn't visible, go to "Windows" and select "Tools." The zoom tool is the light colored magnifying glass. Click on the zoom tool. The cursor will turn to a magnifying glass with a "+" in the middle.

Move this new cursor over the star and keep clicking on this same star. Notice that in the title bar for this image window it says something like 67%, then 100%, 200%, etc... Keep clicking on the problem star until it says 500%.

Now let's select the good top of the star with the Rectangular Marqee Tool:

Move the cursor over to where the top left corner of the selection box will be. Hold the left mouse button down and drag a box over the good half of the star. Then do an Edit->Copy to transfer this box to the clipboard. Then do an Edit->Paste. This will make a new layer of this selection which is an exact copy over the original layer.

Now right click near the selection box and select "Free Transform."

 Move the cursor near the selection box and it'll turn into a little curved line with arrows on both ends as shown below. Now hold the left mouse button down and start rotating the star:

Now release the left mouse button and move the cursor inside of the selection box. Then depress the left mouse button and move the selection box downwards until the star looks round and normal again. Then lift off the left mouse button and press Enter to leave free transform mode.

Note that if you make any mistakes at any time you can undo what you have done by holding Ctrl and Alt while pressing the Z key. You can also go forward by holding the shift key and Ctrl while pressing the Z key.

Then Flatten the image. Flattening the image makes the temporary half of the star we rotated into a permanent part of the image:

Now all we need to do is clean up the part of the bloom that wasn't covered. To do this we'll need to select the Clone Tool:

After selecting the clone tool, right click on the image. Make sure the Master Diameter is about 22 pixels and then hit Escape to make this dialog go away.

The clone tool will copy everything from one small area of the image to another. Since the space around the bloom looks pretty much the same we should be able to copy this surrounding space over the bloom to make it disappear.

Move the cursor to where it shows in the following image. Hold the Alt key down and click on the left mouse buttom. This tells Photoshop where to get the cloned material.

Next hold the cursor over the remaining bloom and start clicking on the left mouse button.. You'll notice the bloom start to disappear. Keep clicking and moving the cursor around until the bloom is gone.

Now hold the Ctrl key and hit minus (key to the right of the number 0) until the image returns from 500% to 100% size and you're through.

Here is the image after the procedure is finished. Move the mouse over the image to see the image as it was before the procedure:

Of course this will work equally well if the bottom side is good and the top side is bad, but also note that this procedure will work if the left side is good and the right side has a problem and vice-versa. A star can also be repaired diagonally if the Elliptical Marqee tool is used to select the good area.