Wonderful forum here, just discovered very recently. I need help learning how to touchup photographs that are faded, but not uniformly across the photo, as in this photo I am retouching for a friend. Fade appears to begin in lower center of photo and worsens to the right. Also a noticable blur begins in lower center and worsens to the right. Will use photoshop CS2 for the edit. Am planning on converting to monochrome with channel mixer, then adding sepia filter. Can anyone offer help with the non-uniform fade and blur repair?

Jake,

This is what I did to restore the print:

1. Duplicated the background layer
2. Made a Levels Adjustment layer
3. Made a curves Adj. Layer and corrected for the right side of the print
I made a layer mask for this layer and added a gradiant, dark on the left
and lightened to the right. This corrected much of the right side.
4. I then made a Channel Mixer Adj. Layer and converted to B&W
5. I made another Curves Adj. Layer with a "S" curve as the correction
6. I made a empty Layer and set the Blending Mode to Softlight and with
10-20% soft Black and White brushes went over the right side a bit
more.
7. I made another empty Layer and set the Blending Mode to Darken and
touched up the shoe.
8. I added another empty Layer and used the Healing Tool and the Clone
Stamp and corrected the tape marks and other problems.
9. I merged the layers, Stamp Visible, and added CS2 Noise reduction
10. I then Smart Sharpened.

k

i tried this one also.

global Fast Fix plugin to adjust contrast, drop the saturation and darken the image a bit.

selected left half (with roughly a 15 feather), splitting the kids, and ran another Fast Fix to lighten to the right half.

ran a global contrast/brightness to bring the whole thing out more.

went back to original picture and selected just the girl's leg with a 2 feather. treated this with contrast/brightness, unsharpen mask (roughly medium settings), then ran Focus Magic plugin. control C to copy to clipboard, then on altered image, control E to drop into place.

i originally tried to clone the leg and shoe into better focus but didnt like it.

great picture, btw :)

Craig

edit: the girl's shoe could be painted darker and her leg could stand a bit of blur, maybe a gausian at around 1.00 or so. lots of other little touch-ups to do for specs and dust.

I also had a quick go with your image.

Duplicated Image, de-saturated new layer.
Cloned out tape marks and a few scratches.
Added Levels adj layer, then applied graduated layer mask.
New layer, Soft light blend, 50% grey. Painted dark onto shoe area using soft black brush set to 10% opacity.
Merged layers.
New layer, sharpened using USM, hide all layer mask. Paint in sharpness to girls eyes and mouth.
New layer, Colour mode, add sepia colour sampled from original, reduce Opacity to 90%.

Sorry for the jpeg artifacts, created when resizing to get below 100K post size limit.

Hi,

jakevalltrades,

Welcome to RP! :pleased:

From your post, I know you work with PS CS2 ... Starting with CS, there is a wonderful new Option in Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlights ... It really works wonder in these cases ... (I'm preparing a Tutorial on it).

That's what I used to balance the fading in your picture ...
The rest was simply 'cleaning' with Heal Brush and Patch Tool,
Levels, Curves and Brightness/Contrast for tone and Contrast,
Neat Image (a noise removing software ... can be downloaded free here (http://www.neatimage.com/download.html),
USM to lightly sharpen.

I couldn't do better with the girl's left leg without bringing out a lot of noise and emphasizing the .JPG compression artifacts...

Attachment 2: a sepia version with lightly darkened edges ...

Hope this helps...

Great job everybody!!!

Hi Flora,

Your approach to solve this type of problem with Shadow/Highlights is very interesting. After using the shadow/highlights, did you use a gradient mask to balance the fading in the picture? I will wait to your tutorial about this use of the Shadow/Highlights.

Hi,

Jaime,

...just to let you know the tutorial is here (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=189)