Tell me what I did wrong

[imann08]

This is the highschool graduation picture on my mother. The original, as you can see, is pretty beat up. I got a good percentage of it fixed but I probably did it all the wrong way. I used a channel mixer to get it back to grayscale using the blue channel. That took out the majority of the splotches on her skin but as you can see, they are still there. I used levels to build the contrast up to where it should be. I used a mask to replace the background. I used the mask again with a gaussian blur and painted around the areas that I didn't want to be effected with the blur. That's about it. I couldn't figure out how to totally remove the blotches though. They are most prominent on her neck. You can see that on the original. It was only scanned at 600x600. I don't have a photo scanner yet. Anyhoo, any critiques of what I did do and help on what I didn't do would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Syd]

I think you did an excellent job in getting rid of the blotches and other scratches/spots. There is a tad too much blur for my liking though so I have attached an almost identical version to yours but with more focus around the eyes and mouth. And you are quite right - the best channel was the blue channel, so I got rid of the other two and made a grayscale from the blue. I think that is the way to go with this image. As for the white spots in the hair...I think the best method is to set the clone brush to darken and a low opacity (say 25). That way you only affect the light pixels you want to darken and don't change any other information in the darker areas. Also I didn't think it necessary to mask out the background...it can easily be cloned smooth. If you really want to do that then you will have to be careful with the finer hair otherwise it could look too 'cut out'.

[imann08]

That was very nice. I did go kinda overboard with the blur but the original has a texture on the print that I found impossible to get rid of. Your background is much better. Ideally I'd like to do that instead of inserting a new one like I did. As far as the white spots and other things that were all over the place I just used the dust & scratches filter. I initially went after it with the spot healing brush but there are so many spots that I tried the filter and it seemed to work. Your work on the background must have taken some time to clone it all out. Did you just use a blur tool to avoid any sharp transitions? My main issue is to remove the texture which I found difficult to do without the serious blur and get rid of the splotches 100% witch it seems neither of us could accomplish. Using the blue channel, while effective, is not perfect. Your version is quite nice though. Thanks!

[imann08]

BTW, in both of ours, the highlight on her forehead is blown out. I'd like to avoid that as well.

[Pocoroba]

You should remove that big hot spot on her head

[imann08]

That's what I was referring to in the previous post.

[Kraellin]

thought i'd go the extra mile here...

craig

[imann08]

I think that was an extra couple miles. I'm in awe. I'd love to know how you went about that. The steps that you took etc. My mother actually wants to keep it in black and white actually but when I show her this she may change her mind. If you would like I'd love to here from you on IM. I get a number of them if you are interested in that. I see that you masked her out but I'm not sure if you actually replaced the background or not. Simply posting that work without any commentary is just playing games with me. lol

On a different note, I'm still interested in getting rid of the blotches completely, which no one has been able to do. I can still see them in your color job even. I'm also interested in a good way to get rid of the print texture. The way that I did it was less than appealing.

[Syd]

Great job Craig. I like it. Imann, actually the background was very easy to do. The whole image took about 15 minutes. First I used a small soft clone brush set to lighten to get rid of the dark spots because there were fewer of them. Then I switched to a large (hardness 0) brush set to darken and swirled it around the background. I then sharpened the image using High Pass (set to 3) and finally put it through Neat Image. Neat image blurred out the background perfectly without affecting any detail in the foreground. That highlight on the forehead is easily fixed by going back to your levels layer and with a very soft black brush set to a low opacity just darkening the layer mask. As for the splotches on the neck (which aren't really that obvious anymore) they, once again, can be sorted out with the clone tool set to darken. It really is one of my favorite methods as you lose less detail that way.

[Cameraken]

Hi Imann08.

I think you did a great job.
I started from the blue channel as well

Ken

[imann08]

Syd, sorry I missed that explanation for the blotches on the first post you made. I was interested in why you chose to use neatimage last after the highpass instead of first before your corrections? I've just gotten the idea that you should take out the noise first and not last. I am interested in seeing how your move of using the clone tool set to darken or lighten. I've never used a blending mode with the clone tool. I'm gonna work on it tonight and see what happens.

Cameraken, another nice nice job of colorizing the image. Very impressed. As you can tell from my version, I am just starting out and hadn't bothered with that process as of yet. I figure you got to get the other basic stuff down before you start messing with colorizing images. Thanks for the nice words but looking at the others it is becoming clear where I am.

[klassylady25]

Your mother has beautiful eyes! Are they blue or green? She also has a smile that warms the heart.

I hope you didn't mind my working on her photo. I enjoy color photos but there is something about black and whites.

Thank you for sharing your family.

[Verywierd]

Fixed the obvious spots with clone or healing tool. All the rest (including the background) was done with duplicate layers lightened or darkened using curves and gaussian blur, masked out and painted back in with a very soft white brush. Sharpening with a high pass filtered layer applied using soft light blending. I was not sure how "plastic" you wanted the image, so I retained most of the film grain and texture where it did not intrude.

[Kraellin]

imann,

thank you. and thanks, syd

i started by using a new plugin that was made by folks on this site, stroker, cameraken, byro and myself. it divides the grays into 32 bands and allows you to darken or lighten each band. i selected different regions of the image and worked on each with the plugin, taking down the highs on her forehead, darkening the fading on her dress, taking out the spots in the background and so on. even the neck/chest and face were done. this, by itself, took out some of the blotches.

the rest was mostly done using the push tool to smooth a few transitions the plugin didnt get.

after that, i set a blend mode on the layer (i forget which now) to blend with the original background layer. this gave me a nice black and white. there was also a curves adjustment layer and a contrast/brightness adjustment layer. these were needed to bring back a little contrast, mostly to her face where the plugin had made it a bit too pasty.

copy merge and paste to new layer.

then the painting. new blank layer above the copy merge. airbrushed in some tones to get a reasonable skin color and then added a manual color correction to this. set another blend mode to lower the saturation a bit and tweak it to a sort of 50's studio print painting. erased where the eyes are and the lips (remember, this is the airbrushed layer, so we want to remove any stray airbrushing from those areas). hand painted the lips and eyes. hope they are blue

that's the basics of it. there were lots of little steps and to try to write that all up would take longer than the fixing of the image.

not quite sure where you're seeing all these splotches. i did do some hand work on the neck/chest and face to try to smooth all that out, mostly with the push tool. but if you feel there's still some there, a light smudge would probably handle it nicely.

there are other ways to fix the original besides this 32 band gray plugin. i mostly wanted to see if the thing actually worked well enough to use as a retouching tool.

and there are others here who do colorizing far better than me. i think i went a bit too light on the application of paint. and if you're interested, i'm sure there are tutorials on how to do this.

so, glad you like it

craig

[Kraellin]

ken,

very nice. is that using your new skin colorizer?

craig