Positive Film! Help me please!

[arcadhia]

Hi...
I come to the Forum any time that the posed challenge worries my skills [cause I want to do a good job of course ] this picture was scanned [10x] from a POSITIVE FILM [technique popular 2 or 3 decades ago] its size is less than an inch, and I managed to get this 2 good scans...
The Task is to remove the head of the guy and rescontruct her arm in the most natural way [that's my worry]
Can you help me? or suggest me the best approach? or a tutorial?

Thanks!

[P.S. Larger Image]

[Kraellin]

arcahia,

lol. when i first read your post and looked at the picture, i saw the main guy's head and went, 'why would you want to remove his head?

ok, so you want to remove the head in the lower portion of the image and add in her arm there. got it

the answer is clone, plain and simple. start where her arm is showing and simply work from there down to where you can see her hand. it's not that difficult. you can even use her other arm, the one you can see all of and make a cloned image of that and reverse it and add it in over the head. it shld work pretty well though you might have to adjust/move it a bit.

if you go the clone method, start with a brush opacity around 60-80%. it kinda just depends on how things look as you go. overlap your steps as you work and the 60% part becomes 100% with each new clone click. pay attention to shadows and lighting as you work, but dont worry too much about fine detail at first, just get the general shape and outline.

when you've got it fairly well blocked in, you can use the push or smudge tool to straighten up edges. click in one spot then hold down the shift key and click further down the edge and it will auto-paint in a nice, straight line giving you a nice, clean edge.

for adding texture, i often use the airbrush set at a very low density and a very low opacity and dab it on, one click at a time, rather than 'spraying' along a line. also, if you do the airbrushing on a separate blank layer you can do a gausian blur which will make the new 'texture' blend in better.

hope that helps.

craig

[Daviskw]

Anything that requires a degree of artistic ability stymies me. This may be one of those pictures. But thought I’d try anyway….lol

I guess folks with ability could clone then shade as needed to make a realistic arm but I am not one of those people. I made a quick search on the net for arms and borrowed one to insert. I used levels and hue/saturation to match skin tone. As you can tell I should have looked longer but I am sure there is one that will at least give you the basic structure. I did this one quickly but taking your time I’m sure you could do much better.

I inserted the arm then cloned and flipped the dress. That gave me a good idea what had to be cloned out below, that was a simple matter because of the dark background.

Butch

[Gary Richardson]

Obvious thing to do here was to create a patch from RHS of woman, and flip it over to cover man's head.

Bit of cloning to hide joins.

This is a very quick job, so there's obviously areas that could be done better, but it gives you an idea of where to start.

[Kraellin]

butch, very nice. it's a bit off here and there but most folks would never notice. nicely done!

gary, i think you got it pretty good except for the inner elbow joint/shadow area.

craig

[arcadhia]

I was looking a Plug In to make it more 'Sharp', someone suggest me FocusFixer, do you know another plug in to make the pictures sharper?

[Gary Richardson]

Well spotted Craig.

There's a whole lot of things that are "wrong", but my excuse is I was in a rush and the whole job only took me about 10 mins to do, so I didn't check things out too much before posting.

I seem to be constantly struggling for time these days, don't know where its all going.

That last statement's not quite true, I do know where it's going, I'm getting more and more tied up with my anti-malware involvements, which seems to suck up time like a sponge.

My commendations to Butch on a very good piece of work.

[arcadhia]

How do I make Sharper the faces? I tried a few plug-ins and nothing...

[Daviskw]

Hi there

How sharp do you want them?... Here is an oversharpened somewhat picture... Just a highpass filter set around 2 and then to hardlight mode.

Butch

[arcadhia]

I was in the middle of this, it has take so long and still don't see the results that I want... I need to retouch the arm, 'repair' the breast, and make the faces look more natural, and look for a better background... [tough part of the waist doesn't look natural... ] well for now I just have my touchpad to work

Original PSD Please throw me some advise!