I have tried everything I can think of to no avail. This is one of my wife's only baby pictures and the damage on it is proving to be very difficult to resolve. Any cloning techniques just don't look right. I have tried replacing the damaged channel. Any suggestions or ideas on how I could fix this photo would be great.

Thanks
Coilte

Hi there

Off for a root canal.. :depressed but I used the lightness channel in lab.. then added color back in the face.

Just a little too bright but no time to play just now

Butch

i had a go at this also. if you dont like clone, try airbrushing on a blank layer with 'use all layers' turned on. then, gausian blur that layer slightly. each time you work a new area or change brush settings or change brushes, use a new blank layer and do the same thing. this is a good way to build up your fixes in stages. use the airbrush brush at a very low opacity, medium high density and medium high hardness.

craig

WOW !!!!!!!!!! Nicely done...I am going to see if I can give it a whirl this evening when I get home from work... :) Cute Baby !!!

What a nice child!
I used clone stamp, healing brush, shadow/highlight and a bit noise.
Regards,
Dan
P.S. Butch & craig, Great job here!

I am going to learn from you two...hehehehee.... :)

Well I tried your method Butch and I just can't get the colors right after using the lightness channel to fix this pic. Any tricks on mainting color balance or restoring the color afterwards? I've yet to try the airbrush method but fear the results will be to soft. The image I uploaded was a small piece of a large portrait has a variety of damage throughout but this stain is the worst of the problems.

Thanks for the help so far.

Jim

Hi Jim

The picture has texture from the type of paper the print was made on. I used FFT to remove this.
Then I made a mask for the stain from the yellow channel and applied this to a hue/sat adjustment layer in RGB to remove the stain.
Levels adjusted
Layers to paint
Neat Image
Sharpened

Hope this helps

Ken.

OK Jim try this

Use the green channel I believe. Copy it to a new document ..change to grayscle then RGB. Return to the original and sample some skin color. Then on the new apply a gradient map using the skin colors from the original.

Copy and paste then new over the old and use a mask to paint in where needed.

Butch

thanks, oltenius. i'd thank others as well, but one says 'you two' where there are 3 posts, so not sure i'm included in that :)

nice job, butch. a bit pale, though.

oltenius, it's a bit rough... lots of brownish shadowy areas.

and ken, that's excellent.

coilte, try a combo of airbrush and clone. go very light opacities on each and use blank layers for each. or, use ken's method with masks and hue/sat. i always have a little trouble with feathering those type masks, but i'm using psp and i think ps does this better.

craig

Very cute child. I brought the image into LAB color where I blurred the A and B channles until the stains were gone. Then used a bit of burning to repair the damaged areas in the L channel. Then took the image back into RGB where I used mostly Hue / Saturation adjustment layers to shift and bring back some of the color.
Regards, Murray

thanks, oltenius. i'd thank others as well, but one says 'you two' where there are 3 posts, so not sure i'm included in that :)
oltenius, it's a bit rough... lots of brownish shadowy areas.
craig
craig, Thanks for the comment! but... Deliberate I wanted to keep this photo technique finding an artistically look! :classic:
Regards,
Dan

Hi,

Jim,

like Ken I used the FFT Filter (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=185) to remove the texture, then, I used 'Select > Color Range' to isolate the dark yellow spots and used Hue/Saturation and Levels Adjustment Layers on my selection to get it to match the original colour and brightness.

I used Levels to remove the overall yellow/reddish cast.

Heal Brush and Dust&Scratches to remove the blemishes.

Neat Image (http://www.neatimage.com/download.html) to remove the noise.

USM to lightly sharpen.

Great job everybody!!!

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Hi Coilte. I first corrected the stain by using Replace Color and then using lab corrected the general color. I used a touch of surface blur to remove some of the texture.

flora,

when you used the color range, did you do all the areas in one swipe, or did you sample different areas one at a time and treat each separately?

excellent job!

and you too, phil. also excellent.

craig

Thanks for all of the great responses they were all very good. I really liked Flora's results so I tried to use Flora's method and just can't seem to get it. The FFT is no problem and making the selection with Color Range worked but any adjustment layers don't even come close to a satisfactory result. What settings for the Hue/Saturation layer did you use? If I can't figure it our maybe I'll fall back and try a different technique.

Jim

Coilte

The more I looked at this one the more I realised there was no quick fix. It would have been perfect if the damage were confined to one channel and the luminosity extracted from one of the others but this wasn't the case. I tried some fancy stuff like using Apply Image to lighten the Blue and Green Channels but it never produced any semi decent results. In the end I used a variety of methods.

I prefer using a quick mask to select the damaged area. I find it more accurate and less time consuming than any of the other selection tools eg. the magic wand, color range etc.

Once selected I used Hue Saturation>yellows>lightness= as bright as it takes to get rid of most of that yellow. I then fine tuned this with Selective Colors>Reds and turned down the yellow or go to Yellows and turn down the black. Sometimes you have to just fiddle to see which one works. Sometimes the yellow is in the highlights and then you have to turn down the yellow in the whites. I am a bit of a messy worker and I tend to do a bit on the face here and then get distracted by something on the ear and add another layer and start cloning. My file sizes get huge and my layer palette is in a mess - not the best way to work. And when I like what I have done so far I usually Merge Visible or take a snapshot in the History Palette and then add more layers above that. I don't think anyone could make head or tail of my Psd files. Sometimes I have no idea what a particular layer is for myself and have to switch it on and off all the while looking for any minute changes in the picture to give me a clue as to what I was trying to do. Or I look at the blending modes...I know if it is Soft Light then that layer was probably Dodge and burn. I am not advocating this as an ideal workflow but it serves to demonstrate how chaotic an approach to tackling an image might get. There very rarely are any simple fixes and sometimes you just have to play around to see what method works.

Having sorted out the yellow I then used the clone brush. I usually have my clone brush set to about 15% and the blend mode to darken or lighten or color but very rarely to normal. I also use Soft Light layers and a very low opacity (3-5%), soft black brush to even out tones. I also use this to redefine the edges that tend to get blurred with low opacity cloning.

You will also have to paint in some colours. Open a new layer, blend mode to color, select a soft brush, sample surrounding color and paint away. Turn down the opacity of the layer and give it a gaussian blur if needed.

I also set the levels, ran it through Neat Image and used Unsharp Mask to sharpen. For some of the marks on the face I used Healing Brush. And I think that just about covers it. Hope you have fun working on it and I am sure you will learn a whole lot in the process.

Sincerely Syd

Hi,

Great job everybody!!! :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Craig,

thank you so much for your kindness!!! :pleased:
when you used the color range, did you do all the areas in one swipe, or did you sample different areas one at a time and treat each separately?... Selection done in one swipe... Just kep the 'fuzziness' very low... Attachment 1


Jim,

glad you liked my restoration!! :pleased:

After running FFT, with the 'Color Range' selection active I created a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer and tweaked Reds and Yellows only ... (values and result in Attachment 2)... well the values I used worked very well with size and resolution of the original picture you posted here, if you work at different resolution you might have to 'play' with those values....

After this, to remove the colour cast, I created a Level Adjustment Layer and set the 'Grey point' on one of the pupils ... Still working on the same Level A.L., I tweaked a bit Red and Blue as I wasn't completely satisfied by the result ... changed this A.L. Layer's Opacity to 80%. (Grey point position and result after this in Attachment 3 ...

Created 3 blank Layers on top:

1st blank layer's blending = Color > sampling colour from surrounding areas, using a very soft brush set to normal (Opacity 40-50%) I painted over the discoloured parts: corner of her eye, temple, background, etc.

2nd blank layer's blending = Lighten > used a medium-soft Healing brush set to normalto remove darker spots/blemishes and to blend in the darker edges of my correction ....

3rd blank layer's blending = Darken > used a medium-soft Healing brush set to normalto remove lighter spots/blemishes and to blend in the lighter edges of my correction ....
Result after this procedure in Attachment 4

You'll find a detailed description of the 'Blank Layer' technique in this Tutorial (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=206) ... just scroll down to the 'Blank Layers set to...' paragraph...

After removing discolorations and a basic 'clean up, all depends on how much or how little you want to do to finish your restoration .... :happy:

Hope this helps...

P.S. ... Took me much longer to write it down than not to actually do it!! :wink:

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