help needed to retouch very old photo

[atkkate]

hi all need help please in retouching this very old photo. Any help appreciated and any ideas how to do it.
Cheers

[Kraellin]

atkkate,

welcome to RP.

i had a go at this one, but i warn you, it's pretty far gone where it's been bleached out. bringing out very much detail is going to be difficult. nonetheless, it's not all bad. you can make out some stuff under there.

i'm not posting all that i did at this point. it was extensive and i've already spent a lot of time on this, so i'm not going to write it all up, even if i could remember it all.

i didnt even try to fix the left side over-exposure parts. there was nothing really there worth saving. i'd just crop that out. i'd also just crop out that black border. you could add any other border or frame back when done. so, all those parts are just in your way when fixing things. i left them in and ignored them.

i may also work on this some more later on. it could be better than what i've done so far. so bear that in mind also.

mostly, this is a challenge of contrast, lighting and color balance with a bit of reconstruction thrown in also. and you may want to split the channels and try to fix each individually. i didnt, but i did look at them. the red channel is the worst.

also, i dont know how familiar you are with all the tools and terminology of photoshop or paint shop pro or whatever you happen to be using, so i'll also wait till you've responded to give more details of what i did.

it's a difficult image and if this is your first attempt at restoration, you've picked a doozy.

in brief, here are some of the tools i used on this:

adjustment layers: contrast/brightness, curves, color balance, hue/sat (mostly just to look at the saturation layout)

filters/plugins: black and white points, smart fix, lum frequencies, digital camera noise removal, hue map (again, mostly to check saturations)

brushes-tools: clone, push, hue up down, saturation up down, lightness/darkness

the trick is to bring down the light but also bring out the contrast for detail and then color balance the whole while restoring some color in the bleached area. for the restoring of color i used a blank raster layer and airbrushed in various parts, including sky, foreground-beach, background trees, various flesh on the people, and hair.

parts of the image had to have their own selections and reconstructions-restorations. blending was then done to smooth corrected areas into the rest of the image.

all in all, a most difficult image. perhaps others will take a shot at this as well. Flora seems to have a good technique with images like this. maybe she'll give it a go.

craig

[mistermonday]

Welcome to RP!
A lot of the detail has been blown away. Also it would be more successful if the scan were somewhat higher resolution and the dust blown off. Here is a quick try to head it in the right direction. There are parts of the image that should just be clones, like the good sky and sand. Then I would work on the lightness channel to darken it in the damaged area, That could be done with some curve adjustment or masking or by painting with the dodge and burn tools on an overlay layer. Here is what I di in a few minutes.
Regards
Murray

[philbach]

Well to start with the green channel was the only one that had some detail on the left side of the picture. I Split the channels and worked on the green Channel as a separate black and white photo. Using levels adjustment layers and masking, I increased the contrast of the green Channel I laid the green channel on top of the background of the original photo using a luminosity blending mode and sort of took it from there.

[Cameraken]

Hi Atkkate.
Welcome to RetouchPro.

I separated the luminosity and repaired that and then added the colour back


Ken

[atkkate]

thank you all so so much.
I am using PS cs version 8
And am still just learning.

[Kraellin]

ken,

i like your color restoration there. care to elaborate on how you arrived at that?

craig

[Cameraken]

Craig.

I Extracted the Luminosity onto a new layer and used selective levels adjustments to even out the banding.
When I was happy with this B&W version I sharpened it with High Pass.
Then I dragged the colour version above the B&W one and set the blending mode to colour.
From there is was a basic restore
Layers set to colour to paint in better colour
Layers set to normal to clone.

Thank You for your comments


Ken

[Kraellin]

ken,

thanks.

the only thing i dont get there is the 'extracted luminosity'. with what did you do this, an HSL split or what?

craig

[philbach]

What I did to get some luminosity extraction in Photoshop was the following; The Green Channel seemed to have the best luminosity so I used that.
I copied the background layer and set the blending mode to luminosity.
Then I used apply image with the Source the green channel of the background layer and the target Layer 1 with normal blending. That helped some. To bring back more of layer 1 I treated it as a grayscale image to bring back contrast into the center area.

My color wasn't so good, I tried to match the left side of the photo to the nearly normal right side, but I suspect Ken used a similar technique to establish luminosity in his retouch.

[Sheri Medford]

I am new too, and I need clarification on how to get that channel to the layers to work on. I read somewhere you could control click on the channel but nothing happened? As far as the rest it is over my head but if I just got the first part for now I'd be happy. baby steps

[Cameraken]

Hi Sheri.

I read somewhere you could control click on the channel but nothing happened

This should give you a selection based on the highlights of the channel. But this is not really what you want.

Luminosity is just the Lightness information of the picture.(no colour)
There are several ways to get this.

A) Image > Mode > Lab and a cut-n-paste back.

B) 1 New layer
2 Fill with 50% grey
3 Set blending mode to Saturation

C) Apply Image
D) Copy Paste
E) Channel Mixer.

Channel Mixer is probably the easiest and most versatile. Especially with a damaged picture because it is very controllable.

For Example setting
Red =33
Green=33
Blue=33
Monochrome checked.

This gives the same as Desaturate.


Setting
Red =30
Green=59
Blue=11
Monochrome checked.

This gives the Human Perception flavour of Luminosity

With a damaged picture it is often possible to extract a ‘better’ Luminosity by playing with the sliders.
In this case if you look at the Channels and click on them you will see that the Green channel contains the most detail.
So back in the layers Palette click on Channel Mixer and use
Setting
Red =0
Green=100
Blue=0
Monochrome checked.

This is how I started my restoration. I used levels etc to repair this and then added the colour info back later.

Hope this helps


Ken