I have to remove the stains from this photo. It's not too bad except for one section on her arm. I've looked at the channels and the red looks to have the least damage but i'm not great with channels. How would you go about it?

Hi Sanda.

Whooo - nasty stain.

I looked at the channels and decided that the red channel was the only one worth keeping, so I just deleted the other 2. That automatically put the image in Multichannel mode, so I went to grayscale, adjusted the levels a bit, and then went to duotone and fiddled till I got a similar cast to is as was on the original.

I switched to RGB and did a bit of cloning on the part of the stain that was still there.

Since the sample is such a low resolution, I really couldn't tell much about the detail in the arm. But from looking at it, if you can get it to this point the rest of the cleanup should be fairly easy to do.

Sorry to be late in responding Sanda. I had limited (i.e. dial-up) internet access for about 24 hours on a "spare" computer, so was a bit out of sorts... :( Things seem to be better now, but for no apparent reason (either for not having cable service or it returning.)

Anyway, I came to the same conclusion that Jak did - keep the red channel and throw the others away. (I did this by using the channel mixer and putting red at 100%, G & B at 0% and checking "monochrome".)

Then a bit of cloning. I didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, so this was about 10 minutes worth. Looking at the original stained image, I finally figured out why it looked like she had two elbows. One was from the stain. :( I tried painting the arm back in on a new layer, but as you can see, I'm really terrible with a brush. If it were me, I'd go looking for new arm in another photo - even if I had to bend it to make it look right. But you should be able to see what I was going for.

Also, I duplicated the layer and set the new layer to multiply mode and reduved the opacity to 45%. This added a little more depth to the detail that is left in the photo. (It also increased the scratches, etc in the sky especially - which I didn't take the time to correct.)

Hope this helps. Please let me know if anything I've said doesn't make sense and I'll try to explain it better.

Jeanie

Thanks Jak and Jeannie you both did a great job and have set me along the right path. I've found an arm that I was going to use. I really must try to work with channels more, I'm sure I'm missing out on something there.
Thanks again guys. :)

Jeaniesa, is there an advantage to using channel mixer instead of just using red channel.

Bob,
No advantage - just the habit that I've formed using the channel mixer whenever I'm playing with the channels - either individual or mixed.
Jeanie

No different to others really. Looked at channels in all modes, ie CMYK, RGB etc...decided to work in RGB, as picture mainly greyscale (tinted), anything but colour is ok for this process:)

Duplicated layer, looked at channels pallatte, deleted all but red. Converted final to greyscale. put marque around the image and straightened it using arbitary command. Creases and blemishes were removed using white brush, large setting. Cropped photo then aded border, by increasing canvas size by 40 pixels.

Finally added duotone (quadtone - no other reason for quad in web based media, other than more pleasing colour combo)

Duplicated layer again then added a over proportioned high pass filter and set blending mode of layer to overlay :)

No better than any1 elses here, slightly different though:)

dang sorry:depressed

great job Mike, hope I can do as good a job as you guys have done.Sorry for the late reply to your post, I've been very busy the last few days and haven't been checking in as often.