I am new to Retouch PRO (first post) and to Photoshop and I have been working on restoring an old family photo from about 1920-1921. I have used the Healing Brush Tool for most work so far and the healing brush has enabled me to successfully remove most of the scratches, tears, folds, etc. in the original scan. However, I am now wanting to remove the graininess, soften the facial features, and possibly add color. In addition, someone along the years has colored in the eyes and has even drawn on eyebrows on the girl. I would like to blend all of these "additions" to the picture so they do not look so fake however the blending I have done so far seems to make it worse rather than better. I am wondering if I need to remove all of the drawing on the face and add in eyebrows myself using Photoshop.

I have been reading many of the excellent tutorials on Retouch PRO and have looked at some of the recent posts (ex. keroger2k, as well as others) on photo restoration but can't seem to right methods to provide the results I am looking for.

Does anyone have any techniques that they feel will provide good results on the attached JPG's?

Thanks for your help

Welcome to retouchpro. For removing grain, your best bet will be to get a noise reduction tool--Neat IMage, Noise Ninja, and Noiseware are three I see mentioned a lot. Neat Image has a free version that is very nearly fully functional, so you can download that and try it out.

For the eyes, you could try to find a photo that has a good-looking eye in it and then use that in the other photos.

For the baby, I copied his left eye onto his right eye and did a little light erasing and cloning around the edges to make it look right.

For the boy, I smudged his eyebrows with a small dry-brush brush set to 50% strength. Then I grabbed one of the baby's eyes and put it over the boy's eyes with soft-light blend mode. I enhanced the glint a bit with a light dab of white

I used the sponge to desaturate the blue color from everybody's eyes.

This artistic stuff isn't really my cup-o-tea--that's why stealing from another photograph would be my preference.

Bart

Hi Bart,

Thanks for the great tips!! I downloaded Neat Image and it is great! I also appreciate all of the tips on the eyes and on how to blend the eyebrows. I have applied these steps to my restored photograph and it's coming along very well. Thanks again and back to work !!

timmotheus,

welcome to RP.

gotta go to work here soon, but just one note on the coloring and restoration; make a duplicate layer of the background and use a hue/saturation/brightness adjustment layer to desaturate the image, taking it back to a black and white first (not grayscale; just an 8 bit rgb with no color). do this as your first step and then work on the restoring. once you've got the restoration done, then work on the colorizing.

keep the background layer in color.

also, it might help others to know which version of photoshop you're using.

craig

Hi Timmotheus,

Welcome to RetouchPro.

I’m not sure whether this picture was colour or was a B&W that has been coloured.
I tried to keep the colour in but it’s not easy to colour correct. Craig’s idea of desaturating it and painting the colour back could have been easier.

Levels and selective curves layers
Layers to paint out the marks
Layers set to colour to repaint
Selective sharpen

Ken

Thank you very much for the replies. I have been very busy this week so unfortunately I have not been able to focus much attention on my picture restoration project until now. I am going to play with the much appreciated suggestions you have provided and I will let you know how it turns out!

Thanks!!

Oh ya, I am using Photoshop 7.0.

It took a day to get around to this and now you have plenty of help!

I recommend that you start with the basics of restoration. You jumped into the middle of it. I have attached a version that represents my first steps in any restoration of this type/quality of photo.

(1) digitize in color.
(2) examine the color layers for damage. In this case your blue channel is very strong but all are severely damaged so we will stay in color rather than jumping into B&W from the beginning.
(3) Remove the major scratches and dust specs. I made 3 or 4 passes with the Polaroid D&S filter.
(4) Remove stains. You have a lot of yellow and some cyan stains. I used PS "Select>Color Range" See Katrin Eismann's book on restoration and retouching for details.

That's where this sample leaves off. It is a much better place to start your coloning, etc.

Good luck. I hope this helps.

Hi there

Maybe it is just me but when you add a little color to the faces the porcelain doll eyes effect seems to be lessened. The baby’s features are washed out so that makes it hard to get a realistic look.

I used Elements noise filter then added a neutral overlay of 1.5 pixels noise.

I removed the cyan caste to the mans suit with a Hue/saturation layer. I did darken the mans suit too much but that is easily fixed.

Butch

A photo of this age would not have been in color at all. It would have been a black and white or sepia tone, there were several. Adding color to photo of this era looks unnatural, although it's a nice job. They can most definitely be a challenge for restoration, I've got no less than 4 boxes of photos ranging from about the 1840's onward, many of which will need some hefty work to save them for our family heritage, lots of work, but a labor of love :)

LadynRed,

I agree with you that colorization of antique photographs is generally NOT something I approve of. I make 3 exceptions:

1. Toning - not really colorization, I tone using every color of the rainbow. It is subtle and applied to the entire photo. Their were/are toners for B&W prints, I don't know when they became available. The common ones were: selenium, Kodak Gold, Brown, sephia, and blue. Initially these were used for archival purposes but later gained favor for artistic reasons.

2. Portraits - formal portraits have long been both colorized and painted on to imitate paintings.

3. Salvage - I have some nice family heirlooms that aren't too special or are badly overexposed. Sometimes I see them as being something much better if I colorize. Even then I tend to avoid colorizing the faces and hands.


Here's two examples of #3. As usual, comments, critique, and disagreement are always encouraged. :bigthmb:

Those are really nice :)

I have so many old, old photos dating back to the 1840's and up. In an old album that belonged to my great-aunt, there are several tintypes/daguerrotypes that have COLOR on them. It's subtle, and it's only one say a girl's bow or hat. I was surprised when I first saw them because I'd never seen that type with any color on them. In reading up on photography processes and especially tintypes so I can get a date range on them, I now understand how they did it and approximately when :) It's fascinating stuff.

Thank you for the nice words.

Just 20 years ago, I was hand-coloring photographs just because I enjoyed doing it. I was in an art supply store last week and I was surprised to see them still there, Marshal's Photo Coloring Pencils. I have no idea how far that method goes, but its probably been around as long as colored pencils have - which I don't know either.

Post some pics so we can all enjoy them. Be careful though, only post them under Critique when you are really ready.