My First Photo Restoration -- Please Critique

[rufinatti]

Greetings, One and All.

Below is my first ever photo restoration.

While talking on the phone with my mom the other day, she asked if I could remove "a few white spots" from a photo she had scanned of her great-grandmother. I was expecting to see half a dozen or so of those white dust specks that sometimes show up, so I said, "sure, no problem"; but I was so very wrong.

When I saw the photo she had emailed me, my heart about stopped and I experienced a moment of panic because I knew I was well out of my comfort range. But, it was my mom who had asked for help so what could I do but set to work?

After several hours and generous use of the stamp tool, I produced the image below. I'm pretty pleased with the result (mom was happy), but I can see room for improvement. For instance, how can I remove / reduce the stain which begins on the left of the image and continues diagonally across her face which makes her look like she has a five-o'clock shadow? I tried painting / stamping over it, but kept messing up the face and was unhappy with my results.

Any criticism and tips for improvement would be most appreciated. If you could also tell me HOW to fix something rather than just that I need to, I would be grateful.

I actually had fun doing this restoration so was motivated to try fixing a photo yesterday that iDad posted in the contest area.

Thanks for looking,

-rufinatti

 

[inkpad.t]

I'm not a restoration man myself but this looks realy good from that cracked image to the new one... keep going its good

I think masking might help to remove the stains.

 

[rufinatti]

I'm not a restoration man myself but this looks realy good from that cracked image to the new one... keep going its good

I think masking might help to remove the stains.

Thanks for the encouragement.

 

[Dom]

One option is to use the clone stamp tool and change the mode to Lighten. Turn down the opacity to around 60% and alt+click the lighter parts then slowly brush over the stains. This will slowly lighten the darker colours (stains) so they fit in with the rest of the photograph.

 

[ALB68]

Good job considering what you started with. I probably would use the Patch tool on those stains. Might even try the spot healing tool. Clone stamp would also work.

 

[Tom Mann]

IMO, you did a fantastic job cleaning up the image.

There are lots of different ways one could lighten the stained area, each will have its own benefits, but, like most things in photoshop, each will have its own undesirable side-effects, so you have to choose which approach has the best cost/benefit ratio.

Normally, when I'm attempting a restoration like this, I'll try to even out any un-wanted differences in brightness between different areas before I use the patch or similar tools to smooth out unwanted texture at smaller length scales.

The method I used for the former was to softly select the darker / stained areas (see mask below), and then apply the shadow part of the shadow/highlight tool to those areas. The result is also shown below. I didn't go further. For example, I did absolutely nothing to smooth the background at smaller length scales because the amount of final smoothing you think is appropriate is likely to be different from the amount I might like.

HTH,

T

 

[rufinatti]

Tom,

Thank you for the detailed response. You did a fantastic job reducing that stain.

I tried to duplicate your example, but my results were much different. Did I use the wrong tool? Or perhaps it's different because I'm using Elements rather than the full-blown Photoshop?

 

[Tom Mann]

Humm... I'm not sure what caused the difference. It could be any of several things, eg.:

1. I don't have PSE, so I don't know how the shadow / highlight tool in PSE works compared to the full version of PS in CS6.

2. I used what is called the "show more options" or "advanced" mode of the shadow / highlight tool. This mode gives one quite a few more sliders to play with. I never use the basic mode.

3. I almost certainly adjusted the "blendIF" sliders on the layer that received the shadow / highlight treatment. I almost always do this, but forgot to mention it in my description.

4. The "marching ants" dashed lines that you see on my screen grab don't give a full flavor of the corresponding mask. The outside boundary of that mask is a combination of soft and hard edges, and then, after I got close to the overall effect I was looking for, I painted black or white in a couple of different areas to tweak it for more or less effect in those areas.

Probably a bit of each of the above factors contributed to the difference between our results. I would be happy to send you my PSD file, but for little demos like this, I don't keep the file, but I'll try to help in any other way that I can (short of starting from scratch and doing it all over ;-) ).

Best regards,

Tom

 

[rufinatti]

Humm... I'm not sure what caused the difference. It could be any of several things, eg.:

1. I don't have PSE, so I don't know how the shadow / highlight tool in PSE works compared to the full version of PS in CS6.

2. I used what is called the "show more options" or "advanced" mode of the shadow / highlight tool. This mode gives one quite a few more sliders to play with. I never use the basic mode.

3. I almost certainly adjusted the "blendIF" sliders on the layer that received the shadow / highlight treatment. I almost always do this, but forgot to mention it in my description.

4. The "marching ants" dashed lines that you see on my screen grab don't give a full flavor of the corresponding mask. The outside boundary of that mask is a combination of soft and hard edges, and then, after I got close to the overall effect I was looking for, I painted black or white in a couple of different areas to tweak it for more or less effect in those areas.

Probably a bit of each of the above factors contributed to the difference between our results. I would be happy to send you my PSD file, but for little demos like this, I don't keep the file, but I'll try to help in any other way that I can (short of starting from scratch and doing it all over ;-) ).

Best regards,

Tom

1. The biggest difference is probably due to the limited functionality of PSE vs PS. I do not have the "advanced" tab you mention.

2. I appreciate the offer to send a copy of your psd file, but that isn't necessary. I don't mind experimenting on my own.

3. I am most grateful for your willingness to answer questions and share knowledge to help a newbie learn.

 

[Tom Mann]

The limited functionality of the shadow / highlights tool in PSE is definitely going to be a factor (see attached screen shot showing enhanced functionality in the full version of PS), but I can almost guarantee you that issues like the ones about blown areas that you pointed out in your previous post are arising from some of the other things I mentioned.

Best of luck and stay in touch.

Tom

 

[dworx]

good job! I am sure it needed lot of effort.

 

[rufinatti]

good job! I am sure it needed lot of effort.

Thanks.

It was a lot of effort (for me anyway), but I took it as a challenge and once I got into it and began to see progress, I really had a good time.

 

[chitkaran]

View attachment 26669

For the stained areas.. you can probably use Smudge tool with 10-15% opacity to smooth out those areas

 

[rufinatti]

I've never played with the smudge tool...perhaps I'll give it a go. thanks.

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Rufinatti -

I'm still kicking myself for not saving the PSD file in which I lightened parts of the image. :sad: I'm especially mad at myself because now that the discussion has turned to smoothing of the texture, I would have preferred to build on what I've already done, not start from scratch.

So, in the absence of that file, to illustrate one way to reduce the texture, I had to go all the way back to the 2nd image you posted in this thread and use it as my starting point.

Instead of manual tools like the smudge and patch tools (my favorite manual tools for such tasks), here's what you can get with a fully automated "fix": I used Neat Image with manually adjusted settings (as shown in the attached screen grab). I didn't do any manual masking or use any other method, just Neat Image. It does a fairly nice job by itself. However, if Neat Image was supplemented with some of the manual tools (eg, to deal with the artifacts Neat Image introduced), the results would be really impressive.

HTH,

Tom M

PS - Note that even though I started with a version of the image that had the darkness problem, Neat Image itself provided some reduction of that problem in addition to smoothing.

PPS - I have several noise reduction tools that one could consider using for this task. These include the vastly improved NR in ACR CS6, Dust&Scratches and all the other NR tools built into PS, Medhi's Noise Shampoo, Power Retouche Pro's "Noise Corrector", Topaz's DeNoise, Clean and Details, and probably a few more that I'm not remembering. However, in my experience, Neat Image always does the best job for on specific "textures" such as we are facing here, one of the reasons being it's customizability.

Cheers,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

... and, if one wants to go completely wild with more automated tweaks and completely avoid manual tools, here's what one might get if you applied Topaz Adjust to the main part of the image, and shadows/hilights to the yellow backing paper portion.

Note: To make the changes easy to see,I cranked everything up more than usual. All the smoothing can easily be reduced.

Since this amount of processing has removed just about all skin texture, I probably would (a) back off on the amount of the efx (as mentioned above), but, (b) I would likely steal a bit of facial skin texture from a different image and add a bit of it to this image (not illustrated).

T

 

[rufinatti]

Wow, Tom! I didn't mean for you (or anyone) to spend so much time and effort on this. That said, the additional information you've provided is wonderful. I just went to the neatimage website and see that they have a demo version available. I believe I shall have to give it a try.