I am working on a very old, faded, damaged picture. I have tried all the tricks I know, and followed some from Katrins's book as well as others. This is as good as any of those ideas (in the books) gets me. I do not want to PAINT in the face. Is there any way to get any more out of this without a weeks worth of work on this one restoration??

This is actually a GREAT improvement over the original, but I would like to get it looking even better. As you can see, it is VERY cracked and damaged...

Any ideas??

Thanks,
Paul :wavey:

Here is a part of the image:

Hi Paul,
It looks like your attachment didn't work. Can you please try again?
Jeanie

Ok, here it is. (I hope!!)

Well, I don't know why I can't upload it here, but here is the link to the pic.
http://www.pictureitnew.com/test/eye.jpg

Thanks,
Paul :wavey:

Paul, what is that? An eye? If that's an example of what the entire photo is like, you have one heck of a task on your hands. Wow!
DJ

Oh geez! Yes, I'm pretty sure that's an eye. Wow.

OK, now that all of my verbal exclamations are out of the way, I'll take a closer look at it. ;)

Jeanie

Well, I can't see any "easy" way out of this. This is a real doozy. I just re-read your help request and realized that you did NOT want to paint on the face. That makes it really difficult (as you can see from the progression of results I posted here.) But, here's what I tried.

1. Looked at each of the channels. The blue channel was almost black and the green channel was also quite dark. So, I threw them out and just worked on the red channel.
2. Adjusted the levels and the cracks were much more visible - but so was the detail of the eye. (v.1)
3. Brought that image into Neat Image to see what that would do. It did remove some of the cracks - at least it looked like I was looking at an eye with some cracks over it and not a bunch of cracks with a barely visible eye underneath.
4. Brought the image back into PS and did another levels adjustment to punch up the contrast. Unfortunately, it looked really blotchy. (v.2)
5. Used a paintbrush at 10% opacity and picked up the colors from the image, painted over it to (a) smooth out the color and (b) remove some more of the scratches. (v.3)
6. I thought that perhaps it now was closer to "normal" scratches, so ran the Dust & Scratches filter (3/11), used high pass sharpening and added the film grain filter at 2. (v.4)

This is the best I could do, so hope this helps a little. Unfortunately, what often appears to work well on a small portion of the image does not always translate to the whole image. I do not envy you on this one. These are the types of restorations that I dread. :(

Jeanie

Wow, Jeanie, that's amazing! And thanks for the step by step info and views.

Phyllis

Thanks Phyllis. (I just added the original image to my progression b/c I realized it wasn't uploaded to the site.)

Jeanie

That is quite an improvement. I will have to try that tonight when I have some time!
Where can I get a copy of Neat Image?? As that is one (I have quite a few) I don't have as of yet.

Thanks for the ideas, I will try them and post the results later, I may post the whole image as well.

DJ, Yes, that is an eye! And the one I posted was AFTER some work had been done. I have 2 images like this to be restored.

Thanks again,
Paul :wavey:

www.neatimage.com

There is a free as well as a shareware version. I have the shareware home version and love it!

Jeanie

Thanks Jeanie,

Now I just have to figure out how to use it!!

I did a quick test, and one thing I noticed is that I can't resave the file as a tiff. :depressed But, I can work around that.

Oh boy!! Something else to play with!! I guess it's good that there isn't a book on how to use it, my wife is getting tired of me buying all these $50.00 books for PS and all it's add-ons! Oh well, it's better than some other habits!! :D

Now I just have to see if I can get the results you did on the eye on the whole image! Do you happen to remember what settings you used>>

Thanks again,
Paul :wavey:

Re: Settings... For the levels, I didn't keep track. I just brought the sliders in to meet the shadow and highlight edges of histogram on the composite channel.

For Neat Image, it's hard to give values, because I always use the process to set up the noise profile for each image I work on. I do know that in the Noise Filter Settings, I left everything default except for the sharpening. For the sharpening, I set "High" to 0% (the default appears to be 50%) and then I set "Low" to 250%. I set the "high sharpening" to zero because that would have accented the remaining cracks.

I think you have to pay to register Neat Image in order to save as TIFF. I've worked with so many noisy/damaged images that the price of registration was well worth it. (It's about as much as a book, isn't it? ;) )

Hope this helps,
Jeanie

Ok Paul I gave it a try and I did it fast so a little more time can produce better results. If we had a larger sample of the face MOre can be done, also a larger version like 600 x 400 pixels.

Any way you can save it, now keep in mind that if I new what the original looked like I could colorize it, but it will give you a starting point.

Thanks Jeanie and Phil,

I am going to do some more work on this tomorrow with some of my new tools. (Neat Image) I will post the results when I have them!

Thanks for all your help, maybe I should post this for a challenge???

Thanks again,
Paul :wavey: