Hello all,
thanks for having me, im new in here :)

I am trying to restore this 20 year old photo from my girlfriend (wife in 1 month!), i was going for the 2 stains first, tried some tips from other threads and used the Russell Browns Digital Stain Remover.
Everything i try makes me loose the eyebrown on the picture... and the colors dont match very well :\
Can somebody help on this one please
(sorry for my bad english)

http://www.filenanny.com/files/46d333696b6c36291/old_500k.jpg

Hi there

I cloned on the background... then copied a selection of the green channel into the red.

Then I used a blank layer set to color to recolor the area with the correct skin tone.

Then a small amount of healing brush and clone tool and a few painted hairs in the brow.

Butch

Nice work Butch.
Ray

coss, welcome to RP.

yes, clone is the way to go here.

Quick rough and ready go here. I haven't addressed all the issues with this picture, just the main features.

I made a patch using her left eyebrow (as we look at her), pasted to a new layer, flipped it, rotated and "deformed" it to fit the picture.

Bit of cloning to remove the BG "blobs".

The staining on her hand was mostly dealt with by painting over it in a colour layer, using colours sampled from nearby good areas.

Finally adjusted levels a touch.

Thanks Daviskw, thanks gary.
You both make it look so easy! I´m impressed.

Then I used a blank layer set to color to recolor the area with the correct skin tone.

How is this done? Can you explain it to me?

next step whoud be cleaning the dirt from the photo right? using some filters or the clone tool?

All photos are made up of two main parts… Luminance… the detail, like the grayscale version of a photo, and Color information.

Most photo editing software allows you to change the two parts individually.

In Photoshop you just open a blank layer… in the layer pallet menu you change the layer mode to color. This means you will only affect the color information not the luminance or detail. In this case the luminance was the same but different colors so I sampled the correct color by holding the alt key with the brush tool active and clicking. This made my foreground color the correct shade of skin tone. Then all I did was paint over the area where the color shifted because I inserted part of the green channel.

If the luminance is not the same the colors will not match but you can group levels...curves…or brightness /contrast layers and adjust luminance to match.

Butch

hello again!

Thanks for the tip tried the color layer on the hand and although i cant seem to match the colors realy well i can totaly see it working.

Just Alt+click a good area near to the discolouration to set your Brush to the right colour. Repeat as you move around the stain. Her hand is not just one colour, so you shouldn't use just one either.

Also set your clone tool to about 10% and on a new layer (Normal Blend Mode) lightly clone over the "joins" to allow it to blend better.