Hi,
I'm a new Photoshop user. I really like the program...and want to learn how to use it. I have several books on it...like the restoration book by Katrin Eismann. It however was not able to help me with the photo that I attached with this message.
For this photo I could fix all the dots and cracks in it easy. The hard part comes with the following 2 problems.

1. Fingerprints on woman's face and rest photo.
2. The left part of the photo has been burned out by light shining on it. Half of the woman's face is brighter then it should be..and lost its sharpness. If you compare the eyebrows you will be able to see what I am talking about.

The fingerprint problem I fixed with the median filter but at expence of loss of sharpness.
The face problem and sweater...I could not fix. I tried using the curves adjustment. The idea was to put a color sampler on the bright side of the face and one on the dark side and make the %grayscale which I read from the (navigator)info window to match. I could not get them to match...and I gave up there...

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

hmmm.. no attachment.... try it again, I am anxious to see the photo!

atachment

photo is way small.... and why is it zipped ? I'd go with jpg uncompressed... you can post a photo here up to 100kb..
RonDon

here is a link to my immage 2.4 megs

http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~vayl/picture/

Purdue Lafayette, or Purdue NW? Whichever it is welcome to the site. I think you should reduce the size of the image to 100 KB or less, then post it. Although you'll get a lot of help here, people are not likely to wait for a 2.4 MB image to load, especially if they're on a dialup. Follow Ron's advice and you'll get plenty of help.

Ed

Here is the link...
this is my first post here ...so its a little unorthodox..apologize

here are link to the 126k and 2.4 meg files:
http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~vayl/picture/

Welcome to RP, Enterprise :)

Wow! This is a real toughie, especially for someone new to this kind of thing...

I just wanted you to know I've got your image and am working to see what I can come up with for you...

I'm also going to post it here to make it a little easier to get to for others who may want to help you.

Hey, Enterprise...

Let me add my welcome, too. You've come to the right place. No doubt Jak will come up with a stellar correction. She's GREAT at this sort of thing.

Here's a fast hack to chew on while she's doing some magic...

One method to consider is to create a replacement eye from the existing "good eye."

Use the Lasso to draw a rough selection around the "good eye" and put it on a separate layer. (CTRL+J). It doesn't have to be perfect... get the eye and a little outside it.

Then select the "new eye" (CTRL+click the layer in the layer palette)... then Edit / Transform (flip horizontal).

Then CTRL+T (freeform transform)... then rotate the eye so it's aligned properly for 'the other side of the face.' Double-click to accept the rotation, then click the Move tool and drag the 'new eye' to the proper place on the face.

Deselect (CTRL+D).

Create a layer mask for the "new eye layer" (click the Layer mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette). Then paint "black" (using the airbursh tool set at LOW opacity/pressure) onto the layer mask to blend the "new eye" with it's new location.

Repeat the process to do reconstructive surgery (steal some left cheek) to repair the right cheek.

Then take the burn tool and burn a little tone onto the right cheek.

Hope this helps a little... Stay tuned for a much better solution from Ms. Jak!

~DannyR~

Wow again! This was a whole challenge in itself... I hope this will be clear enough to understand. Although it looks pretty straight forward at first glance, it is a REAL hard one to work on. Let me know if you have any questions about any of the things I did.

Here's how I attacked it:

Replaced red channel (see tutorials for how to replace a channel)

Used curves to set white & black points (woman's necklace & darkest part of flowers)

Duplicated the background and added a layer mask to the duplicate. With gradient tool (so that edge was feathered) masked all but the right hand side of the image

Adjusted levels on masked layer to make it a closer match to the rest of the image, and then flattened

At that point I decided I wasn't going to get the color to come back as nicely as I had hoped so I decided that a complete hand color was the best solution.

Desaturated image.

I tried every trick I know to easily eliminate those fingerprints. In the end, I made a new normal layer (not color) and VERY lightly painted over them with colors picked up from the surrounding areas until they were smoothed out. (See the tutorial for smoothing unwanted textures)

Could not get woman's right eye to burn in well, so I copied left eye to right side. I also had to skew the perspective a bit to get it to match up to the left eye the way I wanted.

Cloned and corrected a small section of the woman's sweater pattern. Selected a square of the section with the lasso tool and feathered the edges with quick mask & gaussian blur. Copied the selection and pasted it over the rest of the sweater in little bits - sort of like placing quilt squares. It took something like 10 little pasted sections of sweater to "mosaic" it together.

Hand colored image using select and fill on all areas. I made each selection on a different layer set to color blending mode. I also saved all of my selections in case I might need them again. I used Bruce Beard's skin & hair color charts to pick the skin colors (under Resources on the menu).

Added new background with radial gradient tool using original blue colors found before image was desaturated

Selected couple and copied them to new layer and added drop shadow

Used very thin paintbrush loaded lightly with black to define areas around eyes and mouth.


That's about it. It doesn't sound like much, but it took me about 2-3 hours to do. I wasn't real careful with the selections I made for hand coloring and changing the background so the man's hair went a little smooth, but I hope you get the idea...

As predicted, a masterpiece, Ms. Wilson. Simply marvelous.

~Danny~

Awwww shucks, Danny....

Yer makin' me blush...

:blush:

Thank you.

(you know these hopless tasks are what I live for... :D )

Hi everybody!

Welcome to RP Enterprise !

Jak, already, provided you with the best help you could ask for, but I found that knowing different approaches, has helped me very much in finding my own way....:)

I worked on the woman only..and here is what I managed to do..

P.S. Sorry I haven't the time for the description right now....but you can PM or e-mail me if you are interested.....sorry again:(

I am afraid I have not worked on it enough to have a final as of yet, but I do have a question - I don't see the fingerprints people are talking about.

What I do see on the picture is alot of moire. I am not sure if this is a malfunction of the scanner or it is possibly because this is an offset print from a magazine rather than a photo... or what. The moire pattern is only in the red and green channels. Blue is fine. I think the best approach I can think of at this moment is to go with the blue channel only - adjust the levels and then hand colorize it.

I think you're right, Chiquitita. After looking closer it does appear to have a sort of "Newton Ring" appearance to it.

But on the original I have here, I can see it clearly on all 3 channels and not just the red and green ones. So whether it's fingerprints, Newton Rings, Moiré or ?, it's still a tuff one to deal with...

Hi,
I just wanted to thank everyone for helping me with this. I will try to use your advice in recreating the original photo. I will post it after I am done...though it might take some time. I am just a beginner and can spare a few hours if that per day to do this..

Thank you!

That is really weird Jak, I downloaded the 2.4 meg file and there is no sign of the moire pattern in the blue channel in my PS7.

Here's what I have.

This is straight from the original file before I did anything to it...

Chiquitita & Jak, I looked at both the TIF and JPG versions. The TIF version looks clean in the blue channel, the JPG version has definite "Newton rings" in all three channels. -Jeanie

Too bad you didn't do the whole thing, as I think yours is very good. I have done PSP, and PS, channels and histo, and curves and every other kind of enhancement, and am not happy with any of the results.
I would think that the missing color info could be replaced and that would be that, no way. I even made colorized channels for RGB and those also failed. I do think that someone could fix it, but maybe we haven't seen them yet. I could have colorized it better than when taken, but that wasn't asked for. Maybe Jim can fix it, as he seems to be quite talented. I can't. The only reason I'm posting mine is, if I didn't someone would ask.

I agree, Flora - your version is just beautiful. I'd sure be interested in knowing how you did it...

:)

Yes, Flora. How did you do that? Did you turn it to grayscale and then hand color? I just can't seem to get the colors the way you did without turning it to grayscale first. (And given that your "background" seems to be grayscale, that's what I'm guessing you did. ;) )
Jeanie

Hi everyone!

Thank you very much for your kind words and sorry, sorry again for having left half of my work out!!!:( (luckily I didn't take up 'brain surgery' as a hobby..:D) ....but here it comes....

jeaniesa
You guessed right...only it wasn't 'grayscale', but a corrected copy of the Lightness Channel of Lab Color... :)


1) First I duplicated the image twice.

2) I changed one of the duplicate to Image>Mode>Lab Color and highlighted the Lightness Channel.

3) I enhanced the image using the Curves and when I was satisfied, I selected it, (Ctrl+A), copied it, (Ctrl+C) and pasted it, (Ctrl+V), on the second duplicate, obtaining a new, non coloured Layer which I duplicated immediately.

4) To remove the 'finger prints' (actually, it seemed moiré to me....), working on the duplicate Layer, I run:
Filter>Noise>Dust&Scratches, Radius=3, Treshold=0,
Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, Radius=1,
Filter>Noise>Add Noise, Amount=1, Uniform, Monochromatic....(adding a bit of Noise makes everything look more natural!)

5) I applied a Layer Mask>Hide All and revealed only what I wanted, by 'painting the mask with white'...(Usually I don't paint over details like eyes, nose and mouth as not to lose their sharpness!)...If you are not yet familiar with this procedure, the Help>Index>Layer Mask Channel, explains it very well!

6) Well, now I had eliminated the moiré, and had a natural looking picture, but no colour!...In the case of your picture, there wasn't much colour information to be salvaged from the original, but, at least, there was enough, to help in the colouring process!..(I could see that the woman's top was 'blueish'...for example)

7) There are many techniques for colouring a picture with Photoshop....you'll have to try until you find the one you like most....as for me, I usually go for:
a) Image>Adjustment>Hue/Saturation and tick the Colorize Box....moving the different sliders until I get what I want, or as close as possible to it.
b) Image>Adjustment>Curves and 'fiddle' with the different Colour Channels individually
Once you have a basis you can work on, there are about a million ways to improve tonality, depth etc....(have fun trying....)

8) Once I have filled the different parts of the picture with the appropriate colour, I usually follow a 'clean up' procedure using a soft Blur Tool set to either lighten or darken to eliminate the remaining little spots and noise.

9) I used either Color Dodge or Color Burn, (initial Exposure 5% for both), to individually enhance different parts of the picture...eyes, eyebrows etc.

10) To sharpen the image a bit I run Filter>Other>High Pass, Radius between 1.5 and 3, setting the Blending to either Overlay or Soft Light.

11) To finish, I added very little noise Amount=0.8, Uniform, Monochromatic.

P.S. I wrote this description for Enterprise who is a "new Photoshop user".... so please, the 'veterans' forgive me for going into too many details:D :D

Wow, you know your program don't you.

Hi Greg!

:D :D ...I think my 'bloodhound' nature helps me a lot when I get interested in something.....I tend to read everything I can get my eyes on, trying to understand and learn more about it...But it's when I start "opening" things just to see how they function, that I drive my family crazy :D :D .... Can you believe I even opened up a video tape out of curiosity??:lol:

Flora - Great description! :) Don't ever worry about giving too much detail! Even "veterans" appreciate it! :D

Jeanie