Stain & missing detail

[Bill_in_NZ]

Hi, this is my first post here in an amazing site - lots of great info here. Attached is a pic with a nasty stain over the right-hand lady's hair. If it was B&W I would just pick a good colour channel but I'm not sure the best approch to use when I want to preserve the colour & detail.

Lesser importance is the missing detail below - I figure I can copy/paste/clone/transform to fill in maybe half it then just crop the bottom edge up a bit tighter. Is that being lazy? I'm lost as to how to replace detail that is just not there!

Many thanks in advance

Bill

[Ed_L]

Hi Bill,

Welcome aboard! This is by no means perfect, but just something to get you moving. First thing was to make a selection of the hair, copy to a new layer, then use hue/saturation to bring it closer to where it should be. Next, I selected the stain on the background, along with most of the rest of the background. Made a new layer from the selection. Now I turned the eye off on the background layer, and I could only see the background of the picture. Used the patch tool to select the stain, and moved the selection to a good area of the background. With the background layer turned off, I was able to get a good patch without picking up the lightness of the hair, which could not be seen. Turned the background layer back on, and it looked decent, although there is a slight cutout look, which is easy enough to fix. Now I sampled the good skin color to make it my foreground color. Next I made an empty layer, and painted the stain area with the foreground color. Added just a slight bit of noise, lowered the opacity, then flattened. Hope this helps. some.

Ed

[Bill_in_NZ]

Ed
many thanks for your prompt reply. I will use your approach and see how it goes.

I have been playing with PS7 for about 3 years, and have Katrin Eismann's book as my bible, but there is always constant learning involved. I can't believe that I only just found this site, but I'm sure I'll be a regular here now.

Bill

[Ed_L]

You're welcome Bill. As you've found out, this is a great site. Undoubtedly there will be other approaches, and there will likely be better approaches. I just play around with images, and there are many others who are better than me on the site. Good luck.

Ed

[Flora]

Hi everybody,

Great job Ed!!!

Bill_in_NZ,

Welcome to RP!

After removing the stain, I run Levels on each individual Channel to bring out the original colour and improve on tone and contrast.

To 'reconstruct' the missing parts, I used first the Heal Brush ('replace' mode), then I used the Patch Tool to blend the corrections in.

A soft vignette to blur and darken the backgound and make the girls 'pop' out more.

[Bill_in_NZ]

Flora, that is amazing! I must admit I have not explored all the ways the heal brush can be used. I'm now going to check out 'replace mode'. Some days I feel like I have a good grip on Photoshop and then other days I realise how much more there is to learn.

Thanks for your help.

Bill

[noviardi]

i think u must create some tutorial for this so we can see the details

[Duv]

Another terrific job Flora! Here's my humble effort. Tips to improve are always appreciated.

Cheers
Dave

[Bill_in_NZ]

Well I started this thread, I thought I should show you my effort after making use of your collective wisdom and advice! I learnt a few new skills with this one. I found it hard to figure out what the right colour balance would be, but just went for skin colours that looked ok.

I filled in the bottom with lots of copy/transform/clone, surprised me how the bits that were there were enough.

Thanks again all for your input.

Bill

[Duv]

Good job Bill! I agree. Get the skin tones to your satisfaction, everything else is secondary.

Dave

[Flora]

Hi everybody,

thank you very much for your great comments!!

Dave,

Wonderful job!!! Crisp, clean, just great!!!

Bill,

for you too!!! softer than Dave's, dreamy, great colouring (right about the skin tones...), simply beautiful!!!

noviardi,

Originally Posted by noviardi

i think u must create some tutorial for this so we can see the details

... just after Christmas ...

[Ed_L]

Way to go Gang!! As always, we have some great attempts on another image. I told you there would be others.

Ed