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