photo emulsion cracks retouching technique

[juhanson]

Hello,

It is amazing which photographs you, folks, manage to bring back into life!
Could you maybe suggest a solution of my problem?!
My father has a collection of old (ca. 1981) slides, which I would like to scan and preserve for the future generations. The film used is the German Orwochrome and some slides are in a quite poor state now. Take a look. It is not dust, it looks like cracks or hogging of photo emulsion. It covers the whole slide but better visible in dark areas.

Could you suggest a technique (maybe semi-automatic?) how to retouche such defects? I suspect it could be possible to create a mask, covering these nasty flaws. Could the filters like "Find Edges" of High Pass help???

Many thanks in advance for your efforts,
--Eugene

[Panpan]

In Photoshop CS2, I used the dust&scratches filter at radius 3, threshold 5. I then reduced the contrast in the darker areas and sharpened.

That's as (semi) automatic as I could make it. There is still local work to be done, like restoring the eye catchlights.

Pierre

[Kraellin]

juhanson,

welcome to RP!

what an odd bit of damage or artifacting. not sure what caused it.

it's an interesting study in fixing, however. you can take several different routes on this. one route is the semi-automatic with such programs and tools like Neat Image, Polaroid dust and scratch remover, photoshop or paint shop pro's dust and scratch tools... or, you can take the longer route of clone and clone type tools. both have pluses and minuses.

the advantage of the dust and scratch removing tools is speed. they do the bulk work for you. but they often have the drawback of doing too much and end up blurring the image to some degree.

the clone tools are slower; it's more manual and less automatic. the advantage is quality. you're only working on small areas at a time and not affecting the entire image at once.

so, the trick is, what do you want? do you want speed or do you want quality? and, can you get both?

my guess on this image is that you could get some of each. i would not go the full semi-automatic way on this one. you're having to compromise too much quality to get rid of the damage. so, if you ran something like Neat Image, you might set it to only remove a portion of the worst damage with the idea of going in manually to fix the rest. this would have the advantage also of cleaning up the noise in the boy's face in Neat Image while not blurring out all the texture in the rest of the image. you'd then just clone out whatever other major objects of damage still remained and then touch up the rest of the image with whatever might still be called for.

i'm enclosing 3 attachments. the first was done with psp's digital camera noise removal tool. it took a while to find the optimal settings on this one. it was a tricky picture. i then ran a high pass sharpen on it afterwards.

on the 2nd one i ran the same things but i also ran the original in Neat Image and then overlayed it on the digi noise removal image and blended with luminance.

and on the 3rd one all i did was clone in the hair and around the head a bit. i didnt do all of it. i just wanted you to see enough to know what i meant.

so, hopefully there's some routes for you to do some good.

Craig

[Gary Richardson]

Hi juhanson,

Went for a semi-auto attack on this one.

First made a duplicate layer, and applied Polaroid Dust and Scratches filter, set to remove light coloured blemishes. Then masked to uncover areas where detail was lost (like catchlights to boys eye).

Duplicated this layer, and discarded the layer mask. Now applied Polaroid D&S, this time set to remove dark blemishes. Applied hide all mask to layer, by Alt+Clicking the mask symbol at bottom of layers palette. Now I painted over the blemishes I wanted to hide with a soft white brush.

Not perfect by any means, but reduces the damage quite a bit.

[Caitlin]

Hi Juhanson,

I had a very similar kind of damage on some slides I had - we finally decided it was a processing problem:

This thread could be of some help:
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/image-help/10470-another-strange-texture-what.html

[Kraellin]

i'll tell ya, learn something new every day gary, i never knew polaroid d&s could be used as a plugin. i was using it as a stand-alone all this time. so, i went and did a google search and found a site where the guy said all you have to do to use it as a plugin is to move the .8bf file into your plugin folder. so, i did and it works!

so, thank you!

nice job, btw

Craig

[Kraellin]

borrowing on gary's helps, flora's and caitlin's suggestion to read that other thread, and now having the polaroid d&s as a plugin, i tried this again.

i first duplicated the layer.

ran an edit selection and used the airbrush to mask the bad areas selectively. normally i would run a larger mask but i didnt want to blur the whole thing and i wanted feathered masking on the areas in question.

then i ran polaroid d&s on the masked layer. i ran it once on white and once on black, both on the same layer.

duplicated the previous layer.

ran psp's digital camera noise removal on the masked bits just like with the polaroid d&s. (remember, a mask is not necessarily specific to a given layer. so, when i made a new layer and selected it, the same mask is now applied to the new layer).

merge all and save.

Craig

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Craig,

Glad I could help. You'll find some of the functions of the stand alone are not available in the plug in, but it's much more convenient to use.

Really like your latest effort.

Gary

[Kraellin]

gary,

yes, i saw that. that little toolbar isnt in the plugin, but since you can use the main program for all that, i dont miss it at all. and yes, much more convenient.

and thank you.

i think a global neat image or digi noise reduction would be the thing now. it would remove some of the grain in the boy's face and some of that background noise. and then, mix that with the polaroid layer with a blending mode and i think you've have a pretty good image. maybe a sharpen in there also.

Craig

[Gary Richardson]

Sounds good to me. Obviously we're not dealing with a photo in peak condition here, so final result is always going to be limited, but what you suggest seems like it will give about as good a result as you can reasonably expect.

[juhanson]

Thanks for the warm welcome and your valuable suggestions!!!

I carefully studied your methods and it looks like the combination of two polaroid dust and scratches passes (once on white and once on black) together with selective masking works best for this image. The thread of Caitlin gives another impressive example of using this filter. Unfortunatelly I didn't have it installed right now and couldn't check how it works for the whole image (the boy is just a part of a larger family photo).

Personally I decided to try a long route of cloning (thank you, Kraellin, for introduction). It seemed particularly appealing to me, as I bought a Wacom tablet just a few days ago and wanted to play with it. See my result in attachment. The right side is treated with a healing brush in pattern mode, which I generated from a sample of the surface without blemishes. For the boy I used the sample mode.

It is very encouraging to experience such a great support from your side. Thanks again!

[Kraellin]

you're welcome

soon you shall join the ranks of the clone kings and become one with the smudge

Craig

[Caitlin]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

soon you shall join the ranks of the clone kings and become one with the smudge

Can we make that our site motto??

[Gary Richardson]

Nice job Juhanson, glad we could help. Great motto Craig.

[Kraellin]

hehe, sorry, sometimes i just wax poetic you think i shld change my sig?

Craig