Mods: I wasn’t sure where this thread should go: GQ, CS, here, or MPSIMS. Move it if you think best.
The little girl in this picture will turn 90 years old next week, and I want to give her a retouched and enlarged copy of this picture of her brother and uncle.
But as you can see, the print has been damaged over the last eight decades. I’m a novice when it comes to serious photo editing. I’ve been working with Photoshop Elements 6, and it’s not very hard to remove the creases and fix small spots and things.
But I’ve been unable to remove the stains (apparently a spilled liquid), especially on the faces of the girl and boy, while retaining the details beneath. I suspect there are ways to do it, but I just haven’t figured them out. I’ve been looking for sites that might help, but I haven’t found any that deal with this specific problem.
I’m not asking anyone to fix this for me, but if you have any hints or tips as to how to go about it, or can point me to some resources that would help, I’d love to hear about them.
[FYI: I have Photoshop Elements 6 and Micrgrafx Picture Publisher 9.0, but I’m not going to buy the full-blown Photoshop or any other program that costs more than about $30 to fix this. So please don’t suggest that.]
I dabble in photo retouching, but my skills are a little rusty and I haven’t had time to really do much in the past few years.
One thought: The photo you linked to is greyscale. If you scanned in full 16 bit colour, would the stain have a distinctive colour? If so, you may be able to filter that colour out either through channel mixer or applying a colour filter in greyscale view. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether Elements has this capability as I use full Photoshop.
I hate to say it, but it looks like the stain over the faces is actually damage from one of those “magnetic” photo albums. Not so much from the “magnetic” (IIRC, it was really just static electricity) but from the overlying clear plastic. I’ve seen other photos that were so badly harmed that some of the image transferred off the photo and onto the plastic.
At least that’s my guess, based on that polka-dotted area in the bottom right corner.
As **Hodge ** said, if the staining is colored in any way, you could try an RGB scan, and filter out that color then convert to grayscale but if it’s not any particular color, you’re kinda stuck. You could try some freehand painting, but that can make things look worse if you’re not careful.
All things considered, that photo’s actually in decent shape for being roughly 89 years old.
I would at least print a new photo for her, without attempts at touch up. You can then try touch ups, and a print that in addition. with as much damage to the facial area as this photo has, I think your attempts at clearing it up will make it look fake.
I’m a full Photoshop user, and I’ve never used Elements, so I hope that these features (or near approximations of them) are there. But that picture doesn’t look unrecoverable by any means.
Scan it at as high a resolution as your scanner will do, especially if you’re going to enlarge it.
-First, deal with the contrast and any color casts. Use Levels and shove the end sliders in to meet the beginning/end of the histogram. Do this before you do anything else, or you’ll “enhance” your edits. You can use “curves” for more control if you’re comfortable with it. This can also let you grab more detail (if it’s there) out of the man’s coat.
Try a noise reduction filter, but be prepared to back it out if it doesn’t work.
gotpasswords trick and variations are a good one if you’ve got a color image, or colored damage, but if not, it’s not likely to help. Still, take a look at the R, G, and B separations and see if one looks better than the others (they’ll probably all be almost identical, given a decent scan).
Use the clone stamp tool to fix the creases and large issues. Resample constantly and from various directions, or you’ll get pixel-stutter (repeating patterns that weren’t in the original image).
Select the entire image, copy it to a new layer, give that layer a small blur. Set the opacity of the blurred layer to something fairly low (25% or so). Turn the layer on and off, decide if it looks better with it on. If it does, merge the layers.
Select the entire image, copy it to a new layer. Give that image a huge blur (guassian or normal, doesn’t matter), until it looks like you’ve rubbed lard on your glasses. Set the layer mask for that layer to all transparent, then set a soft-edged paintbrush to about 25% opacity (75% transparent), and paint back the mask in any areas that should be more or less solid but are mottled. Stay away from the detail areas, but this should get fix the smooth areas. You may need to paint over a given area several times. This will fix most of the dress and the face. Don’t overdo this, especially on skin, or you’ll get the dreaded porcelain doll look.
Clone stamp again for the detail areas of the face and dress. Use a very small, but still soft-edged brush.
The face of the smaller child you’ll need to reconstruct, probably. Small clone stamps from his/her face and the girls.
If there are any problem areas in shadow, use the burn tool (or a mostly transparent dark brush) with a soft-edge brush to put them further into shadow.
Similarly, take a soft white/dodge brush with and lighten teeth and eye whites. Don’t overdo this one, either.
Consider a duo, tri, or quad-tone (or gradient map) if your tool allows it; it basically lets you pick colors for the dark/light, dark/mid/light, or multiple levels of color. Pick colors similar in hue to each other and similar in value to what you’re doing - the idea here is to add some interesting content to the image, which will tend to hide any lighting imperfections.
When you’re done, sharpen it until it looks good on screen, then sharpen one more time for a small enlargement, or twice more for a large enlargement. The extra sharpening will look a little bad onscreen but should print nicely.
Optional: Don’t forget that layer masks are your friend. Nobody cares about the background of that image (particularly the damaged tree), so you might just want to paint in blurriness in the background - basically changing the focal length of the shot nine decades after it was taken.
Completely an amatuer. Which is to say I’ve never attempted anything like this before. I tried to follow Time Winder’s steps, but I dont understand anything about masking or how to use that. The rest I kinda winged. Anyway, I’ve emailed it to you. Feel free to upload it to imageshak or something so everyone can laugh at it.
Thanks, guys, for all the advice. I’ve been playing around and it’s clear I’m not going to become a Photoshop expert this week. I haven’t been able to get close to the stuff you have done.
GuanoLad, did you crop the image after making your improvements, and if so, could you send me the full-size image with improvements? My e-mail is in my profile.
commasense, I’m still curious if the stain has a distinctive colour or not. You’d be surprised how effective colour filtering would be if the stain isn’t black or grey.
Sorry, I meant to answer that. No, it’s gray. Color filtering didn’t do anything. But thanks for the idea. It hadn’t occurred to me.
And gotpasswords, although you’re right that the picture is in an album with wax backing pages and clear plastic covers, the stain was almost certainly caused by a spill that occurred long before the picture was put in this album. None of the other pictures have any damage similar to this.
It figures that this one picture, with its stains, was the one that my aunt particularly said she wanted to see again! The dozens of other pictures are nearly perfect, with only minor, easily fixed, blemishes.
I was bored and since I have Elements on my computer I decided to give it a go.
I tried to smooth over the stains with clone stamp, dodge and burn but lost quite a fair bit of detail in the process so they look kinda ghostly. Oh well. :smack:
You might be able to message some of the winners and ask for their help - I’m sure most would help for free, or perhaps a donation to a charity or something.
I thought I’d try my hand, as well. I think GuanoLad has made a good start but I wonder if folks are going a little too heavy with the clone/healing stamps. Things can start to look mottled and plasticky when you over-use those tools.
Although I made liberal use of the clone and healing stamps, esp. on the borders, I decided to take a slightly different approach on the faces by selectively burning and dodging the stained areas. This is because there is visible detail there under the stains so I wanted that detail to show through by lightening those areas.
As you can see, I also played with selective contract adjustments. Unfortunately, flickr has a tendency to muck around with colour and contrast when photos are uploaded. The original PSD file isn’t quite so contrasty and I can send it to you if you want to take a look.
Here, I started with Hodge’s try and did minor cleanups – darken the man’s suit coat, remove all the specklies by hand, median filter (very noisy image), unsharp mask to restore a little detail. This really needs to be scanned at a much higher resolution to get a good restoration. The man’s hand-less sleeve is a bit spooky, maybe crop that?
Are you sure this isn’t just the difference between viewing in Photoshop, which tries to use proper color spaces, vs a browser, which doesn’t?
Glad you were inspired to take the ball. I was running out of steam near the end of what was only supposed to be a little exercise. I mainly focussed on the faces as the most important part.
Agree about the resolution. commasense should scan it in as high a resolution as possible and in full RGB colour, as well. One should always start with as much information as possible.
The handless sleeve bugs me, as well. I ultimately decided that it just wasn’t worth trying to restore the baby and I cloned him out, but I couldn’t make his hand work in the new composition. Cloning it out was a fast and lazy solution
This is an old argument on flickr. If you read some of the discussion groups, you’ll see that this issue comes up again and again with no firm answer on either side. Some people maintain that colour and contrast changes are strictly due to the conversion from Adobe RGB to SRGB while others say something else is going on. I fall in the latter group. I definitely see changes in my images that can’t be solely attributed to changes in colour space.
