Hi all.. my first post here :)
I'd like some ideas on how to fix a problem photo restoration.
First, it is a photo taken in the 70's and it came to me with a horrid red/pink cast. I was able to fix that pretty easily. This photo of a child has a really horrible octagonal pattern to it in the photo paper, which is a pain to deal with in and of itself. The worst though is that someone wrote across this photo in blue ink ! Some of this ink goes right across the child's face, so I not only have to deal with the pattern in the paper, but how to get out this ink too. The ink is highly visible in all 3 channels.

I've replaced the background with a faux studio backdrop and that eliminated a great deal of the ink problem, but I just don't know how to solve the combination of the pattern AND the ink on the kid's face.

I've got the FFT filter but it did cost me some detail. I ran it on a copy of the picture, so the original is still ok.

Help ... any suggestions ?? Do you need to see the photo ?? I use Photoshop CS and I'm not a novice with it. I've learned to do quite a bit of restoration from Katrin Eismann's book, but this problem is a devil.

Thanks in advance !
Diane

can u attatch a thumbnail so we can see?

Sure.
The 1st one on the left is a close-up of the kid's face with the original color cast corrected and the background already replaced.

The 2nd one is the status of the photo to date.
The 3rd one is the photo as it was given to me - pretty ugly.

I've got plenty of work to do yet, but I need to get this ink out somehow. This is 1 of 2 of the only photos my co-worker has of her husband as a child, so I'd really like to clean this up for her.

Thanks !!

yuck! lol. I can't help you with instructions for Photoshop, but i'm sure it's going to take a lot of masks and stuff. A lot of the members here are seasoned pros with the editor you're using. maybe they'll come up with something.

Yeahh.. yuck exactly. Hopefully someone can suggest something.

Thanks for looking :)

Yeahh.. yuck exactly. Hopefully someone can suggest something.

Thanks for looking :)
Hate to start from scratch, however, I would have started with either the green or the blue channel, copied and pasted that channel into your layers as a starting point. You would have to clone to fix the ink left on the face, but it is less daunting then with the original. Then use curves or levels to adjust different areas of contrast and then colorize. Lots of work no matter how you get there.

Lots of people here can give you other ideas, as there are always multiple ways to get to the same objective in Photoshop.
~Nancy~

Hi Diane

I looked at the blue channel and it had the least ink so I converted to grayscale and back to RGB using the blue channel.

I then cloned the few dark spots out and used the healing brush as well. Then I just added color back using the gradient maps.

Butch

Diane

You may already know this so forgive me if you do. A way to reduce the moiré of paper is to scan using the descreen function if you have one.

Also scan the picture in one direction then flip it upside down and scan again. Then import them to layers flip and align using the difference mode. Experiment with opacities and blendmodes from there. Scanning in different directions reduces the shadows that aggravate the paper moiré.

Also I have Elements so I don't know the Photoshop equivalents but I use a combination of filters to reduce the moiré even more. I start with the noise filter then a second application of the medium filter. I use masks to keep detail where needed such as the eyes.

Good luck
Butch

First, I followed the procedure described in this tutorial to attenuate the paper texture.

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=185

Then create a blank layer with blend mode set to color, then use the brush tool. Sample colors near the ink and paint over them with the brush. This gets rid of the vivid ink hue so now it's just a luminance noise.

Create another blank layer with normal blend mode and use the heal and clone brushes to remove the rest of the ink. Using the step prior to this to remove the hue helps the heal brush not to have to work so hard--if you skip it you'll find the heal brush does great removing the luminance error of the ink, but it's hard to remove all residual bluish color.

Copy merge (ctrl-alt-shift-E) and ran Noise Ninja on that.

Create yet another blank layer to do a bit more healing that I overlooked before.

Copy merge again and do a selective smart sharpen to sharpen up some of the facial features.

If I were doing the whole thing, I'd probably have curve-boosted the saturation and tweaked color balance slightly.

Bart

Diane,

I know this is not going through the retouching phases of fixing the photo. Do you have the actual photo or just a digital version of it? I 've worked in the photo lab business for 17 years, and there is a product on the market called PEC12 that takes ink and even sharpies off a photo without damaging it.

It's just a suggestion but thought I should throw it out there.

ladynred,

welcome to RetouchPRO.

FFT is one of the most difficult plugins to use...effectively. i've spent some time with it and it's always a bit of a struggle getting things right. nonetheless, when it works, it works well.

you shld also know that there is more than one way to use it. the original post introducting us all here to FFT stated you use CLONE to wipe out the little stars. if you dont know what the little stars are, you shld read the tutorial. however, somewhere along the line, CLONE got coverted to PAINT THE STARS BLACK. and that's how the tutorial ended up being, paint em black.

now, it's sort of existed that way around here ever since, but a couple months ago it occurred to me that if painting them black would work, then cloning shld work even better. so, i ran a few tests and got some decent results.

today, when i saw your post, i was already using clone instead of black, so i started playing around and got some so-so results. so, i decided to find the original threads and re-learn how to use it. in doing so, i noticed the original reference to FFT and it said CLONE! ok, that's pretty cool. i had actually converted back to the original way not even realizing it was the original way (forgive me for patting myself on the back here ;) ).

at any rate, i still wasnt getting the results i thought i shld be, so i went back and read the formal tutorial on the subject. sure enough, i had missed a step or two. but, the thing said paint em black. i ignored that part :)

however, on my system, with my program, i got no little stars in the red channel. that seemed a bit odd. and in reading the tut it had explained that the FFT was a mathematical procedure that only a computer would understand. ummm, those kinds of statements always make me a bit.... curious.

so, i decided that if the thing was mathematical, and that math has, usually, a certain elagance and even beauty when applied to graphics, and that normally that math will show as a pattern, and since i do a lot of retouching, wouldnt it make sense to just 'FIX' the mathematical pattern. in other words, retouch the FFT image to its intended elegance of being a mathematical representation.

so, i did a little 'restoration' on the FFT pattern in the red channel. the heck with the stars (since there werent any, really) and the heck with hunting and pecking for the errant paper pattern; let's just make it pretty! and sure enough, it worked!

now, i did somewhat approximate where the stars shld be. i also worked on all this after doubling the size of the image (i cut it back down after). but basically i just looked for the overall pattern, looked for where it was wrong and corrected it based only on the overall 'look' of the math.

now, i dont know if this will always work. most likely it wont. but it did seem to do a fair job on your image.

attached is just the result of the FFT, still in de-saturated mode. you would then take this and add it over your original and set the FFT fix to luminance blend mode.

from there you have two ways to go, clone out the ink or do the coloring. i'd suggest clone and such first.

and from there, you have two more ways to go; try to bring out the colors of the original, or wipe then and paint them in yourself. you didnt mention which you had done and i'd be curious to know.

so, if you followed all that, yer a better man than i, gunga din :)

craig

p.s. i'm fairly sure this isnt going to look very good. the compression was pretty severe. i may put up another tomorrow.

Craig,

The reason you didn't see stars is the version you worked on is so reduced in size that the spurs (that's what I call the stars) has been aliased into the data way down at the center of the FFT. In order for the FFT to work, the scan must be high enough resolution to capture the pattern (not just the image) with good sharpness. Another requirement for the FFT to work well is the pattern should be fairly well aligned to horizontal and vertical. If it's slightly rotated, it also will make the spur pattern more complicated--ie., fainter spurs and more of them.

Bart

Hi Diane.
Welcome to Retouch Pro.

The pictures posted are under 50kb. The limit here is 100kb so the pictures could be bigger.

1) FFT. Unfortunately the picture is not high enough to run FFT so I skipped this. But it should be the First step.

2) Ink. In the Magenta and Yellow channels the ink is almost gone but I decided to stay in RGB and use channel mixer. Using a mix of mainly Green to reduce the blue ink. Followed by a bit of painting and cloning to remove all traces.

3) Add back the colour and adjust Levels.

4) Layers to paint and colour.

And that’s about it. I did some selective sharpening and removed some of the pink cast from the background.

Ken.

bart,

yes, i'd sort of thought that as well, which is why i doubled the image size before running FFT. they still didnt show, but i could sort of guess and it seems i came pretty close.

craig

Thanks for all the input !! I'll answer the questions posed in this thread.

- I do not have the photo, I have a scan that was given to me. The scan is fairly large in size, but in looking back at the PSD file it's only 144 DPI. I agree I need a higher resolution, I typcially scan at LEAST at 300dpi, sometimes 600.

- the pattern - if I have a photo with a pattern, I always scan it with descreen. My scanner does a really good job of getting rid of such things (it's a Microtek), so yes.. I know about it ;).

- FFT. I did use FFT on the original scan, but as Bart noted, the resolution clearly isn't enough to get better results. I did see 'stars' and worked the same tutorial you linked to here. The lower res likely explains why I didn't get better results.

Touch, I'll look for that product !! I've got some old family photos of my own that I could use it on so it will certainly be used more than once. Where would I find this PEC 12 ?

Ken - when I posted the thumbnails I didn't really expect anyone to actually try to work with it ;) Trying to work with such a small sample is tough but you folks have come up with some very amazing results. When I started this restoration, I'd never tried converting to either LAB or CMYK, but if the ink is nearly gone in the yellow and magenta channels, perhaps that's what I should do.

To get to the state it's in now I used a number of adjustment layers - levels, curves, color balance, and different blend modes. I decided to replace the background because it seemed to be the easiest and quickest way to get rid of the majority of the ink. However, I did get stuck when it came to the ink on the kid :(.. so I came to ask the experts here :bow:

I'm going to see if I can get the original photo and scan it myself and use the flip and re-scan mentioned here.

Thanks !!

I'm not sure where you're located. At the labs I've worked at we always bought it at a photo supply company in town. I did find this link to it at Adorama http://www.adorama.com/CHPEC12.html?sid=11459362032266518

The only suggestion I can give you about using it, is to spray it on a piece of soft cloth of some kind, then wipe your photo. Don't spray it directly on the photo itself.

It is a miracle cleaner. I love the stuff!! If you can take anything off a photo before doing your retouching, it's less time on the computer for you. And besides it makes you look llike a genius to any clients you have.

Thanks !! I'm in Nashville, TN btw. Not many good camera stores here, mostly stuck with Wolf/Ritz, but shopping on-line tends to be cheaper anyway :)

Would this stuff work on TinTypes, or is that dangerous ?

I haven't tried it on anything but traditional photo paper. You might be able to call Wolf/Ritz and ask them if they have used it and if it would work on tin types.