There is a lot of "grunge" for lack of a better word on this photo, and the person can not take over. Is there a way to get that off, besides blur and using the history brush to smooth it out, or painting over it?
thanks in advance.

hi nan,

this is one of those that i work on and i post and i just know i'm going to hate the next time i look at it, but i gave it a shot.

this was a combo of many things; small scratch removal, salt and pepper filter, lots of smudge and push, a color balance adjustment layer, some clone, stroker's lum frequencies, fast fix plugin in, several flatten alls and some others i'm probably forgetting....oh yes, a couple raster layers with airbrush of skin tones, some sharpening brush...umm....and again, probably more :)

Craig

Well I have probably failed in your request as I got the best results of judicious blurring, dodging and burning and opacity adjustments. If you look at the blue channel however, you can see that there is quite a bit of junk there and so I firstly blurred the blue channel. I played with replacing the channel but no, got the best results with blurring, etc.

well, i was right. i wasnt real happy with that first one. it also had a complicated workflow that i wasnt even going to try and post.

so, i took another shot. only this time i wanted something i could share and was fairly simple. so, the workflow was simple;

duplicate background
magic wand on color mode. pick one of the 'grunge' areas under her nose without the 'contiguous' setting on. this picked up almost all the 'grunge' areas plus some other stuff.
used 'edit selection' to change the selection to a mask. edited out the parts of this mask i didnt want to fix.
'edit selection' again to change the mask back into a selection.
now i have just those areas i want to change selected.
from here you could do several things. i did a curves adjustment layer, a brightness/contrast adj layer, and a color balance adj layer and grouped all three with the masked layer. (you dont have to group these, but i did just in case i wanted to do some other things).

and that's it. it's NOT done, but i think this makes a pretty good starting point and removes a lot of the 'grunge' without destroying the photo.

Craig

Well thank you both of you. When I first looked at the photo all I could say was "yuk" now at least I have somewhere to start. :grin:
~Nancy~

Nanis,

The correct word for this "grunge" is JPEG artifacts.
This image has been seriously over-compressed in a .jpg save.
I did a tutorial (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=150) on the subject of JPEG some time ago, which may help to explain (or completely confuse) about what is happening.

There is no way to completely remove JPEG artifacts, however there are a couple of tools that can help diminish the problem, both of which can be found in my ten-minute tool box (http://www.retouchpro.com/resources/fileinfo.php?id=40).
JPEG Clean-up: will take out the worst artifacts, without loosing too much detail;
Colour-declipping: will help fix the blotchy colours.

(the toolbox posted works in PS7.0, I am still wrapping up the CS2 version)

Posted - the result after applying only the two tools. (also did a quick fix on the left eye)
After this there isn't much of an alternative to blurring/stamping and smudging.

Rô

Thank you for being so helpful, It is apprciated!
~Nancy~ :D

You know Roland, I did a correction this morning using Cleanup and Skin Fix. Looked pretty good to me but I got ascared cause I dint know if that was the grunge issue. Yuk. Yuk. BTW, how's the tan line comin?

Dave

Tan lines are easy ....

...just put in a 50% grey layer with blending set to soft light, and use a not-too-soft brush to dodge and burn until you have created the lines...

Just kiddin', Duv :wink: :wink: :wink:

Rô

thanks Ro. fraid us psp guys cant use your toolbox. as for .jpg artifacts, i dont think that was all of it. it looked like an over-shading thing to me; you know, where when it gets dark it goes reddish. a lot of the grunge i took out was nothing but that.

Craig

Using the Neat Image plug-in (http://www.neatimage.com). I sampled a small 64x64 area in her lower left chin/throat area to get this result.

- Kurt

nice job, kurt! neat image comes through again!

i took another shot at this and went a bit further this time. i used a secret weapon this time ;)

Craig

That's looking pretty good, Craig. Alrighty, I'll bite - what's your secret weapon? Lemme guess...a heavy application of Clearasil? :wink:

That's looking pretty good, Craig. Alrighty, I'll bite - what's your secret weapon? Lemme guess...a heavy application of Clearasil? :wink:

Yeah, Craig, come clean....(tap...tap...tap...tap...)

Maureen :wink:

hehe, kurt. well, i suppose you could call it digital clearasil :)

ok, this is the link to the 'secret' weapon: http://www.mediachance.com/digicam/cleanskin.htm and, as you can see from the link name, this program is 'ClearSkinFX'. i ran this very early in the workflow and it did wonders. this program is mostly only useful for portraits and not general noise reduction or cleaning. but it does work wonders on some things.

Craig

edit: that was just for the grunge stuff. other edits were done on the teeth and eyes using other standard tools.

Ah, very nice. Looks like a useful program - thanks for the tip, Craig.

- Kurt