stripe merge/removal

[cinderella]

Hi , Hope everyone is enjoying the summer and the olympics as well as the campaigning.
Am enclosing a photo of my kids taken in the 80's. IT has faded and discoloured some so I thought I'd take the opportunity to bring it back to life and at the same time remove the stripes on the shirts and perhaps add some lace around the collar on my daughter's shirt. (She's the one on the right who says she looks like a boy, even tho she loved dressing like her brothers for the photo.)
I've tried several things:
-Selecting the dark stripes>hue/sat to turn them green
-Selecting the light stripes and doing a similar thing to turn them dark green.
-Selecting shirt, edit fill with nice color dark green. This loses the folds and creases in the shirt.
-Tried new layer, coloring but stripes still show through.
-Greyscale and colored but stripes still show thru.
-Searched the forums and Karen's E"s book.
How can I get rid of the stripes and keep the creases and folds. ???????

[kbeatrice]

Hi Cinderella! Can you post a bigger picture? Check here for how to create files for attachments, you have up to 100k to use.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/photo-retouching/4398-resizing-images-retouchpro.html

The post you want are the two oldest at the bottom.

Thanks,
Karen

[roger_ele]

Hi cinderella,

Here is how I approached your stripe issue ...

The first goal is to create a curves layer that adjusts the light stripe down to the dark stripe in both brightness and color ...

-Grab the color sampler tool and place one color sampler in the light stripe and one in the dark stripe.
-Create a curves layer, close it, paint black over the dark stripe where the color sampler is so that your adjustments don't affect that spot.
-Open the curves layer again (Channel RGB will be active) and click on the middle of the line, drag the point you created when you clicked on the line towards the corner that makes the image darker. Look at the info pallette while you do this, to get the brightesses the same you want the middle color to be the same, in this case the Green channel.
-Swtch to the Red channel, click and drag until the Red numbers are the same, same with the Blue channel.
-Now close the curves window, fill the curves layer with black and paint white on the curves layer where you want to darken.

That is the basic idea, you can use the Red layer to create a selection to fill the curves layer to make it quicker and the tiny lines that are left can be cleaned up with clone/heal/patch etc. Remember you can also clone in color and luminosity blending modes when needed for final clean up.

Hope this helps,
Roger

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Cinders, I tried a technique very similar to Rogers, and it works to a degree, but the result is far from perfect. The trouble is that what appears at first to be a relatively simple task is quite complex. There are not 2 shades of green in the stripes, but many shades, and the light reflected is not the same in all areas, therefore you will need many curves adjustment layers, and many layer masks to get a believable result.

If you're looking for a fast simple solution, there does'nt appear to be one, though I'll be happy to be proved wrong on this.

Is it really important to you to change these stripes, or was this just an exercise in photo manipulation.

[Xaran]

You could try adding a new layer and painting over the whole top with an appropriate shade, then add another layer in overlay mode and with a low opacity brush and black add the shading back in where appropriate. Hide the new colour layer to see where the shading should go. Add some noise or texture to improve the overall effect.

Christine

[Leah]

I got rid of the stripes basically by following the same approach Roger selected -- except I used two color samplers on the dark stripe and two on the dark stripe (for each, one on a highlight and one on a shadow). Also I had to use two Curves layers, one on your daughter and younger son and one on your older son -- I think the lighting had made the contrast between stripes different on his shirt.

Then I used the Patch tool to get rid of the lines between stripes (there was a good match between the colours of the two, but there was a fairly obvious line where they joined).

Then on the older son's shirt only, where there was still a bit of a colour difference between stripes, I sampled some colour from one point of his shirt, added a new layer in Hue blend mode and brushed on with a soft brush and low opacity just to draw the whole together.

I did try adding lace to your daughter's collar, but it just looked silly. So I tried making her shirt a different colour in the hope that would make her look less like "one of the boys". Selected her shirt and added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer -- bosted the saturation just slightly and moved the Hue slider around until I found a colour that seemed to fit.

[Gary Richardson]

Great job Leah, you can just see the stripes on the boys shirts if you look carefully, but excellent nontheless. How long did it take you to do this ?

[Leah]

Doing the stripes not too long -- maybe half an hour (although I wasn't counting so I may be underestimating). I then spent probably another hour or so trying to put lace on, taking it off again, and playing around with different colour shirts, though.

I agree with you -- if you know there were stripes originally you can see where they were, but I thought I'd got it to the point where if you didn't know there were stripes originally they wouldn't be obvious. I guess with more work and some subtle blending layers they could be obliterated altogether, but I wanted to catch some Olympic coverage last night...

[cinderella]

Thurs. AM Just got the replies to my "problem" Thank you one and all for tackling this problem. I think you got good results. It was a relief to hear that somone else thought this was complex. I'll be trying some of these techniques this afternoon. Now that the stripes will be gone their faces will be the main focus of the photo. Thanks again.

[T Paul]

I gave it a quick try.

1. Duplicated Image
2. Selected light stripes and placed on new layer
3. Selected dark stripes and placed on new layer
4. Made the light stripes darker, Image>Adjust>Replace Color
5. Made the dark stripes match the new light stripes, Image>Adjust>Replace Color
6. Merged the light stripes and dark stripes layers
7. Used the Patch Tool and Clone Brush to eliminate the edges of the stripes creating a solid color shirt
8. Used the burn tool to paint in some shadows on the new shirt (stroked over the existing shadows)
9. Levels adjustment to correct color
10. Filter>Other>Custom to sharpen

[Leah]

Pretty darn good, T!

[T Paul]

Thanks Leah!

I thought you did pretty darn good too (smile). I also liked your suggestion of changing the color of the girl's shirt to help her stand out from the boys.

~T

[T Paul]

Roger, I liked your approach of using Curves to adjust the colors. Think I will have to give that method a try!


Christine,
Good idea of painting a new shirt layer. That's one way to replace those stripes. The tough part will be recreating the shirt's texture.


~T

[roger_ele]

Roger, I liked your approach of using Curves to adjust the colors. Think I will have to give that method a try!

What are you talking about T - Yours is beautiful!

I will have to remember that replace color exists - I am just not used to it.

Roger

[T Paul]

Thanks Roger! Really my first time playing with the replace color command. Still took some tweaking with the patch tool and clone brush to completely hide evidence of the stripes.

Doug's got a tutorial you might want to check out: Replace Color Command