Hi there, I have only recently joined and never posted before. I don't have much experience with photoshop yet, but I am slowly learning when time permits (bit difficult with a very active young son!).

Anyhow, I have a stack of photo's that need fixing, due to my arm getting in the way of the flash while zooming in when taking portait photos. I hope that makes sense! The first is posted below, and is a quite significant photo to me, although pretty useless in it's current state.

If anyone could help me out, it would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Missablue,

I'm no expert at this kind of restoration, so I'm sure you will get much more effective attempts at fixing this. Just to see what I could do though I did have a try. What I did first up was to run a shadow/highlight adjustment which is a new feature in Photoshop CS. It seemed to help a fair bit. Then I selected the darkened section of the image and adjusted brightness and contrast in each colour layer seperately. The layers were all too damaged to substitute I thought.

As you can see it's not a great result - but you can at least see the child. I'm sure that some of the experts around here will come up with far more satisfactory results - and I'm looking forward to reading them!

Oh - and I used neat image on the damaged section at the end to remove the grain. It obviously still needs a lot of work though.

Depending of how many photos you need to do, this could be quite a laborious job!

This for me is a tough restoration. Examination of the Blue Channel showed that it was barely discernable and had a lot of digital noise and other artifacts. However in this case I did the following
1.) I selected the dark area of the image. I just used the lasso area around the dark part and saved the selection as an alpha channel and then blurred that alpha channel
2.) I then copied the dark bottom part of the image to a new layer
3.) I used Adjustments/Shadow Highlight with Aggressive settings
4.) Then a levels adjustment layer
5.) Filter Reduce Noise (In photoshop CSII)
6.) Neat Image with aggressive settings.

: )

I just used levels..afew passes of it.
as for the connection to the head its tricky..
bringing up the image leads to grain, grain leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

hope this helps a little.

I took a slightly different tack.

For the main problem of the shadow I made a Levels Adjustment layer and moved the sliders until I had a better image. I then used a soft, black brush on the Layer Mask for the area blown out by the adjustment. I then made another Levels Adjustment Layer and adjusted each RGB channel. Next a Curves Adj. Layer to help the contrast.

The remainder I used Color Balance Adj. Layers, Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush, Clone Stamp Tool, Empty Layer with Softlight Blending brushes. CS2 Noise Reduction, Flattened, Smarp Sharpened.

k

Had a play with your image as well. Adjusted levels on both dark and light sections. Colour corrected darker section. Cloned to hide joins a little.
Flattened image. Duplicated flattened image, set blend mode to Darken, blurred using Gaussian Blur, reduced layer opacity.

Still needs work.

Hi missablue,

Welcome to RP! :pleased:

Been working on your picture on and off, trying different approaches ... the one that worked better for me was using the red channel ...

The shadow is still visible but the sweet baby's little face too :wink:

Great job everybody!!! :bigthmb:

Great work Flora. I can never seem to get the light in the eyes and sharpness that you do.

Something that may have possibilities is Duplicating the background, go to Image:Adjustments: Invert then change to Soft Light and adjust opacity. There was quite a bit white and dark dust in the image, Poloroid filter might help.

Cheers
Dave

Thanks, Dave....

Great job!!! :thumbsup:
Something that may have possibilities is Duplicating the background, go to Image:Adjustments: Invert then change to Soft Light and adjust opacity...I've been working on that method trying to find a better alternative than the 'fill flash' technique to the 'new' CS Shadows&Highlights adjustment .... I actually wrote different actions in that direction but they involve quite a bit of 'user' interaction and, while they work beautifully on some pictures on some others they don't give the wished result... :sad: :sad: