Everyone has one thing that, when they see it in a photo, gives them the retouching heebie-jeebies. My own is random mottling.

What is your one most dreaded thing to retouch?

Red color cast (blue fade). Never been able to get it right.

Rebuilding a face...just did one of these and it gave me nightmares! You have to be perfect or you will lose the person's personality. Why is is that rips and stains in old photos are always right on a person's face! :D

Have to go along with Greg. The face is my worst enemy. I can usually repair or replace a missing part but a face is pretty hard to replace with someone else's.

Bob

Not having a lot of artistic ability, I'll also have to go along with badly damaged facial features. You can get by with imperfect work on clothing, or a chair or something else. But the face requires much more to make it acceptable.

Ed

I agree with all the rest of you. damaged faces are next to impossible to get looking right.

- David :)

Insufficient data on the image is "always" a pain, especially if the data loss is the face. As we all know, if you take a mirror image and split the face, it loses the specific features of the individual. Seeing that no faces exist that are perfectly symmetrical, any work done by copying the left to the right is just being hopeful on the restorers part. :)

Yup, gotta agree with the face thing... :bawling:

Hi everybody!

...yep..I agree with everyone.. :depressed....but, on top of it....

I heartily dislike moiré!!! ....

My top dislike is "silvering out'. The old sepia photos that have just about lost all detail in those areas.
Second is big, dirty backgrounds. I don't like to replace the background, so cleaning it up is very tedious and tricky, as it seems to show every mark.

The dreaded requests from a current client - "Can you do something about my double chin" followed by "Can you make me look thinner".

Dread no more. Check out this thread:

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1388

Many thanks, Doug! I'm still wending my way through the treasure trove of information in this forum.

Hi June. Welcome aboard. As you've probably already found out, you're gonna like it here. :) Just take about the next six months to check everything out, and if you find something old that you'd like to comment on, feel free to do it, as almost all old threads are still available.

Ed

I hardly ever 'restore' images as many people here do. I currently do retouching, colour correction and other prepress stuff for our internal magazine work (fashion to architecture). So most tranny or print originals are good quality photography and fairly new and often damage free.

My issue is a more general one, which can happen anytime or anywhere when extensive retouching is required on subtle toned images...

Grain and texture makes me shudder - seamlessly matching repeating patterns that my have very subtle interactions happening that go unseen until you start retouching. When not dealing with a live job I think I know all the tricks - but when the pressure is on nothing seems to work as intended. <g>

Which is why the healing tools of Photoshop 7 or perhaps the AlienSkin Image Doctor plugs are a welcome addition to the retouching toolset...too bad I don't have access to these tools at work!

Stephen Marsh.

Restoring a face is definately a pain if you don't have much image data to work with, but my current "oh god no" tyep of order is heavy heavy staining where there is no good place to clone from.

This restoration took me *forever*:

http://www.alceria.net/restoration/small%20original%20copy.jpg

The man's arms and chest and the baby's face gave me the worst trouble. I ended up picking up sections of the stain (because the stain varied in color) with the magic wand, and then would apply a hue/saturation correction to get it to something resembling skin tone. I get each part to match as much as possible and then would use the rubber stamp and healing brush to even things out. There was so much staining and cracking of the image that it couldn't be fixed by cloning alone. Anyone have any other ideas on a good way to approach a problem like this? I ended up with a decent picture at the end of it but it took entirely way too much time and the image lost a bit of it's sharpness. I'm hoping to find a better way to do this in the future. I already have another order that resembles this one entirely too much!

EYES!!!!! I enjoy just about every repair/retouch that i've tried except repairing someones eye . just never been able to get them right

Alceria,
What a great picture!
I did a little work on it (no time to finish).
I picked up the skin color from the chest, and painted it on a duplicate layer. I blurred it, and added some grain. I took a snapshot, and then painted with the history brush.
Vikki