Need Some Help - Difficult Restoration!

[bigkidjr]

I'm hoping someone can help me with this... I'm doing this restoration for one of my students (I teach an evening communication class at a local community college). It is a difficult restoration that has taken me way over 10 hours on and off to do, and I'm still working on it. I'm charging the student $75 for the job.

Here's the problem: The original photo (I believe it was a colorized black and white) was printed on textured photo paper. Although I was able to take care of most of the discoloration, stains, tears, etc., the image is still very grainy.

I've been working for many hours on it again tonight and I still haven't been able to correct the grainy problem. Is there any way that this can be fixed?? Any help or advice you all can give me would be most appreciated!

I've attached the before and after images to this post.

Thanks so much for the help!

kid

p.s. The original photo size is a little over 8x10, so my restoration will need to be printed at least that size.

Thanks again!

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Kid,

First of all congratulations on a fine restore of a difficult picture.

I tried a couple of things to reduce the noise, and this gave the best results for me (though its far from good). Don't know how effective for a 10x8.

First of all, ran picture through Neat Image, this satisfactorily removed noise from BG, but was not too effective on the girls faces.

So I duplicated the filtered picture, and applied Gaussian Blur to new layer (adj value till noise is gone. Applied layer mask, and masked areas where the blur had corrupted detail. Lastly reduced layer opacity for best result.

[Panpan]

I dragged Neat Image's blue rectangle to the girl's brow and let it analyse the noise there. That seemed to work well.

The biggest problem is the boy's chin where the original colorizing masked all modeling. I tried to restore it as best I could, but you may have to ask your client if the chin is as he or she remembers.

Pierre

[bigkidjr]

Thanks for the suggestions... Unfortunately, I don't have Neat Image, so I can't try these techniques... I did try using a Buzz layer set to darken over the grainy layer, but this just made everything blotchy. I also tried a dust and scratches layer set to darken over the grainy layer, but this just left me with little black grains rather than little white ones.

Maybe the way I have it is the best that can be done?

One other question: Do you think I could have caused the grainy problem myself, or is this the usual by-product of doing restorations on texturized old photos?

Thanks again,

Kid

[twinkissed]

I would say it probably depends on how many times you altered the photo, what kind of brushes you used, etc. This is what I came up with ONLY using the poloroid dust and scratch filter. I apologize that I don't remember where the link is on the board to get it but. All I did was use the lasso tool and use the filter in sections. Obviously didn't finish but that was the ONLY tool I used and I think it worked well. If you use the preview tool in Windows and go back and forth you'll see the difference. Hope this helps some.

[Gary Richardson]

Polaroid D&S filter available Here

[Kraellin]

neat image is free. there is more to one link to it listed in the various forums. or, you can just google it.

there are several ways to reduce graininess. neat image is very good. psp's digital camera noise removal is very good. polaroid D&S is pretty good. even a simple median filter will do a lot of good, though i'd mask just the girl first and do her separately.

i studied the original image and your colorized version. the girl's face has more damage than the boy's. i'm guessing in that whatever you used, particularly if it was a clone, that you cloned out some of the damage, but that you also cloned in some. it is very easy to clone damage from one part to another, especially small dust or grain noise. so, that would by my guess. generally, in an image like this i start with a VERY small brush, like only a size 2 to 5 or so. i make one small, clean area and then grow it larger. this gives me a clean base to work from. you may have to do several of these in a varied color and texture piece, but it partially ensures not copying damage from one area to another. also, the healing or stamp type clones bring in pixels from other surrounding areas to do the healing. so, if you're healing one area with a copy of another damaged area you just get more damage, albeit usually smaller in size. then again, if you're using something else, then never mind

Craig