Need help

[Paul Rupp]

I am working on a very old, faded, damaged picture. I have tried all the tricks I know, and followed some from Katrins's book as well as others. This is as good as any of those ideas (in the books) gets me. I do not want to PAINT in the face. Is there any way to get any more out of this without a weeks worth of work on this one restoration??

This is actually a GREAT improvement over the original, but I would like to get it looking even better. As you can see, it is VERY cracked and damaged...

Any ideas??

Thanks,
Paul

Here is a part of the image:

[jeaniesa]

Hi Paul,
It looks like your attachment didn't work. Can you please try again?
Jeanie

[Paul Rupp]

Ok, here it is. (I hope!!)

Well, I don't know why I can't upload it here, but here is the link to the pic.
http://www.pictureitnew.com/test/eye.jpg

Thanks,
Paul

[DJ Dubovsky]

Paul, what is that? An eye? If that's an example of what the entire photo is like, you have one heck of a task on your hands. Wow!
DJ

[jeaniesa]

Oh geez! Yes, I'm pretty sure that's an eye. Wow.

OK, now that all of my verbal exclamations are out of the way, I'll take a closer look at it.

Jeanie

[jeaniesa]

Well, I can't see any "easy" way out of this. This is a real doozy. I just re-read your help request and realized that you did NOT want to paint on the face. That makes it really difficult (as you can see from the progression of results I posted here.) But, here's what I tried.

1. Looked at each of the channels. The blue channel was almost black and the green channel was also quite dark. So, I threw them out and just worked on the red channel.
2. Adjusted the levels and the cracks were much more visible - but so was the detail of the eye. (v.1)
3. Brought that image into Neat Image to see what that would do. It did remove some of the cracks - at least it looked like I was looking at an eye with some cracks over it and not a bunch of cracks with a barely visible eye underneath.
4. Brought the image back into PS and did another levels adjustment to punch up the contrast. Unfortunately, it looked really blotchy. (v.2)
5. Used a paintbrush at 10% opacity and picked up the colors from the image, painted over it to (a) smooth out the color and (b) remove some more of the scratches. (v.3)
6. I thought that perhaps it now was closer to "normal" scratches, so ran the Dust & Scratches filter (3/11), used high pass sharpening and added the film grain filter at 2. (v.4)

This is the best I could do, so hope this helps a little. Unfortunately, what often appears to work well on a small portion of the image does not always translate to the whole image. I do not envy you on this one. These are the types of restorations that I dread.

Jeanie

[pstewart]

Wow, Jeanie, that's amazing! And thanks for the step by step info and views.

Phyllis

[jeaniesa]

Thanks Phyllis. (I just added the original image to my progression b/c I realized it wasn't uploaded to the site.)

Jeanie

[Paul Rupp]

That is quite an improvement. I will have to try that tonight when I have some time!
Where can I get a copy of Neat Image?? As that is one (I have quite a few) I don't have as of yet.

Thanks for the ideas, I will try them and post the results later, I may post the whole image as well.

DJ, Yes, that is an eye! And the one I posted was AFTER some work had been done. I have 2 images like this to be restored.

Thanks again,
Paul

[jeaniesa]

www.neatimage.com

There is a free as well as a shareware version. I have the shareware home version and love it!

Jeanie

[Paul Rupp]

Thanks Jeanie,

Now I just have to figure out how to use it!!

I did a quick test, and one thing I noticed is that I can't resave the file as a tiff. But, I can work around that.

Oh boy!! Something else to play with!! I guess it's good that there isn't a book on how to use it, my wife is getting tired of me buying all these $50.00 books for PS and all it's add-ons! Oh well, it's better than some other habits!!

Now I just have to see if I can get the results you did on the eye on the whole image! Do you happen to remember what settings you used>>

Thanks again,
Paul

[jeaniesa]

Re: Settings... For the levels, I didn't keep track. I just brought the sliders in to meet the shadow and highlight edges of histogram on the composite channel.

For Neat Image, it's hard to give values, because I always use the process to set up the noise profile for each image I work on. I do know that in the Noise Filter Settings, I left everything default except for the sharpening. For the sharpening, I set "High" to 0% (the default appears to be 50%) and then I set "Low" to 250%. I set the "high sharpening" to zero because that would have accented the remaining cracks.

I think you have to pay to register Neat Image in order to save as TIFF. I've worked with so many noisy/damaged images that the price of registration was well worth it. (It's about as much as a book, isn't it? )

Hope this helps,
Jeanie

[phili1]

Ok Paul I gave it a try and I did it fast so a little more time can produce better results. If we had a larger sample of the face MOre can be done, also a larger version like 600 x 400 pixels.

Any way you can save it, now keep in mind that if I new what the original looked like I could colorize it, but it will give you a starting point.

[Paul Rupp]

Thanks Jeanie and Phil,

I am going to do some more work on this tomorrow with some of my new tools. (Neat Image) I will post the results when I have them!

Thanks for all your help, maybe I should post this for a challenge???

Thanks again,
Paul