this is a picture of my grandmother. I try to restoration this picture for my mother and my aunts for mother's day. I think they would really like it. my grandmother pass away almost two years ago.

I need help with selecting brush stoke for clone stamp and to fix really damaged areas such as background and jacket on the left side. I would greatly appreciate all tips on how to restoration this picture.

P.S. I kind of of need a workflow or where to start.

First of all: welcome aboard

Now for the work-flow:

I would scan the image at a higher resolution. Generally speaking, the higher the resolution, the easier it is to retouch the image. The reason for this is because the higher the resolution the more information you have to work with. I would also recommend that you scan it in color even if ultimately you want a black and white photo.

I would adjust the levels and curves (if you are not familiar with them, we'll help you).

Regarding the size and stroke of the brush, here is my golden rule: I use the smallest one that will do the job. For very large areas (background, walls, floors etc.) I'll use maybe a 75 or 100 pixel very soft brush. However don't take this as a final rule because it all depends of the resolution of the image: the larger the image, the bigger the brushes you will be able to use. And off course the size of the defect.

I would fix noise and scratches that the image might have. I would also test at this point if sharpening or softening would improve the image. It may or may not. You will have to be the judge on this.

At this point you should have a sharp, well contrasted image that, however, still needs repairs.

How to repair the rips and scratches? There is no "magic wand". Depending of the severity of the defects you will need to use a multitude of tools that in some cases will give very nice results but in other cases may not. There is only one way to get there: experiment with the tools available to you.

When it comes time to start repairing the image defects, I start with the face, then the body and finally the background. Others will probably recommend slightly different work-flows depending of their level of knowledge of the software used and the years of experience. Once you do this a few times you will notice that you will become more comfortable with certain sequences. Stick with the one that gives you the best results.

Once you start working on the image, post your progress and I'm sure others will jump in and help you in your efforts.

Once again, welcome aboard!!

this is a picture of my grandmother. I try to restoration this
...
P.S. I kind of of need a workflow or where to start.

Hi, lwjphoto. Welcome to RetouchPRO :bigthmb:

I hate it when peole tell me that I ought to have a plan before starting a project - I just want to jump in and get started. :D
So don't hate me, OK?

You need a plan! (plus everything Frank posted above)

When you're starting out it's not easy to look at an image and know what you will have to do. Sometimes a job can look difficult and turn out easy, and (too many) other times it's the other way round.
I'll risk myself here by saying that this is easier than it looks.

In any photo there is a centre of attraction, a focus for the eyes - and there is the rest. In retouching the "focus" should be as perfect as possible while the "rest" has a lot more leeway (margin for error).

In this case the focus is the face, hair and blouse. You're lucky that these areas are quite well preserved. All of the worst damage is in the background.

So my advice. Don't waste time with the background, just paint over the cracks or do away with it all together. I don't see any details in the coat, so paint away.
Concentrate your efforts on the face.

Welcome aboard!

Rô

I appreciate the help and useful. I rescanned at high resolution. I curved, leveled, and did a high pass sharp on to have an idea of color correction would look like. I will admit I do a lot of glamour shot retouching is there is to much thing with most of them. This is different because I have to think. Once color corrected picture look great b&w or colorized. I am send another picture this is my attempt filling in the cracks ... I use clone brush but I brush is to soft and my don't look right. I came to conclusion that I will probably to airbrush of jacket and creat a different background. Question should use clone to repair cracks on the face or use an airbrush.

Is this the size of the scanned image?
What was the resolution?

I appreciate the help and useful. I rescanned at high s to ....
to repair cracks on the face or use an airbrush.

the resolution is 300 pixels....

lwjphoto,

welcome to RetouchPRO.

this is actually a pretty easy image to work on. it might look tough to start because of all the background damage. but, the important parts still have lots of detail, thus, making this a pretty easy image to restore, at least for personal use. i wouldnt try to sell it to Ken Burns of PBS 'Civil War' fame, or a museum, but for personal use, you can do some really quick things to make this job look a lot easier.

1. make a duplicate image on a new layer.

2. desaturate the image to a complete black and white. (i used the Fast Fix plugin for this).

3. set your clone tool to 100% opacity (really strong), make a new blank raster layer and set your clone tool to 'use all layers', and just start cloning over all that damaged background. (this puts all the cloning changes on the blank raster layer by themselves). if you want to try to save some of the backdrop, that's fine. there's not a lot there, but it does add character and keep with the history of the image. you could paint some of it back in if desired.

those simple steps will remove a lot of the 'clutter' and make the job seem quite a bit less imposing. i did this and have attached the image. took about 10 minutes or less.

from there, you'll want to lower the opacity quite a bit and set the 'hardness' down to something under 80%. i normally start at 80% and work down the finer the detail i work on. i dont use photoshop, so i dont know exactly what the equivalent tools are called in photoshop, but i know they exist.

you actually dont need a higher resolution scan. you could, and you might get a tiny bit more detail, so that's up to you and what you have available to work with.

when you get down to working on the finer details, it's sometimes a good idea to double the image size within your graphic editor. this gives you more detail in the actual changes you make and avoids things like aliasing (the 'jaggies'). i often do this on smaller images like this.

airbrushing can be very useful also. but, make a new blank layer and do your airbrushing on that and apply it sparingly. then, try a blur --> guasian blur on that layer to make it blend in and smooth out even better.

it's a great picture. your grandmother looks to have been a strong worman.

craig

Had a quick go with your picture, mostly just a lot of cloning.

Bit crude, with a better resolution picture and more time you should be able to get it better than this.

gary,

i like what you did with the background there. what'd you use, a 'stock' backdrop there blended in? looks nice.

craig

No Craig, just patched and cloned from the original. (rotated and deformed some of the patches). Had to guess a bit as to what I thought the original was.

Had to add a bit of texture to the final picture to hide the over smoothed areas I'd caused by cloning a bit too soft in places.

gary,

well, that's pretty amazing. there is no detail, even blurred or faded, above her ears except for those black post things, and you've managed to add a pretty realistic looking building-scape of some sort there. so that's a pretty remarkable job there.

craig

Thanks Craig, for a bit of a rush job, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Just don't look too close, there's a whole lot of things that could have been done better. (Just gotta love that texture, it hides all sorts of evils).

New to Elements and retouching I'm afraid but I do like a challenge. Lots of healing brush and cloning. I few color burn neutral layers to boot.

Love to hear what you all think

Butch

The only tips I can give that I didn't see here are that you want to use a soft brush for the clone tool and a hard brush for the healing tool. You also want to make all your adjustments to the image on layers that are separate from the original background. That protects your original layer. Use adjustment layers whenever possible. At least that's my opinion. If it's not possible then create a WIP layer by selecting the top layer and then clicking ctrl+alt+shift+E for CS2 or create a new layer above the top layer and then click the above.

Don't be afraid to play with blending modes. They might now help as much in some but are generally great things to play with. Using layer masks is also very important especially if you are using adjustment layers as I recommended.

Finally, your grandmother seems to be a bit off-center in the picture you are showing. One thing to help speed up the process is to center her up by cutting off some of that missing right side. that background isn't the most important part so you can totally eliminate it or blur it to death for a quick fix and then worry about the important part which is your grandmother. That's up to you though and how important you feel the background is.

Isaac

No Craig, just patched and cloned from the original. (rotated and deformed some of the patches). Had to guess a bit as to what I thought the original was.




Had to add a bit of texture to the final picture to hide the over smoothed areas I'd caused by cloning a bit too soft in places.


Hi Gary,
How did you add the texture-with a filter?
Bob

Wow, Gary's version is fantastic. I've tried similar things in the past and always thought the restoration looked over done. But seeing a job done by somebody else really makes me think twice about my own work. I guess there's something to be said about being your own worst critic eh?

Jon.

Hi ifixpix,

yes, I used Filter > Texture > Texturiser... in PS7. Chose Canvas and used the following settings (these would change with the size of the image you're using) Scaling 100%, Relief 4, light direction top.

Jon, thanks for your kind comments. Had a look at some of your photos (not enough time at present to view them all), nice work.

Hi ifixpix,

yes, I used Filter > Texture > Texturiser... in PS7. Chose Canvas and used the following settings (these would change with the size of the image you're using) Scaling 100%, Relief 4, light direction top.

Jon, thanks for your kind comments. Had a look at some of your photos (not enough time at present to view them all), nice work.


Thaks for the tip, Gary.
I have not played with filters much, but the masking benefits are intriguing.
Bob

You're welcome Bob.

Thanks for the idea Gary...even a small amount of texture and noise takes away that overworked look.

Butch

You're welcome Butch.

Nice job you've done on the image. Just one minor criticism, her right eye (as we look at it) is slightly out of line, and looks wrong. Needs rotating a little.

I've done a v.quick "correction" on your picture to illustrate, hope you don't mind.

Not at all Gary... funny I did not see that.... I guess it does take a village… You know that is something I have learned to do with my own work. Put it aside and come back a few days or a week later. You see errors you did not see before. Makes for a much better job

Butch