Before and After Critique

[AtlanaAnna]

Here is the before and after of an old photo. In the bottom right corner, there's handwriting that says, "All My Love, To Sis, Bobbie". I'd love to be able to bring that out somehow.

[Caitlin]

Hi Anna,

I only got a new monitor yesterday and haven't calibrated it yet, but on my screen your retouched version seems a bit dark - that hasn't helped in keeping the writing visible.

Colour looks a bit green here as well, but again I need to do some tests on the monitor before I say that's not just me!

On the attached I have simply brought up the grey point in levels, which reveals a lot more detail, including the writing, as well as a few stains and marks (I only removed the obvious one in the top right corner - the damage on the bottom of the photo would take a bit more time to fix) I also took out a bit of green with color balance. Finally a bit of Neatimage noise reduction.

Without the jpg artifacting I think this could bring the text out quite well.

Apologies if these comments are wrong based on the foibles of my new screen!

You could probably bring out a bit more detail of the writing with sharpening as well.

[AtlanaAnna]

Looks better to me. I definitely agree it was too greenish and dark. This is the first image I've worked with in Photoshop. I know so little. A lot of the things you talked about are over my head so I really don't know exactly what you did but it does look better. Thank you so much for you input! I wish I knew where a Photoshop Bootcamp was. I learn best with an instructor present at least at the beginning of my learning experience. After I get a good foundation, I can take off on my own. I have several books I'm reading on Photoshop. They are: SAMS Teach Yourself Photoshop 7 in 24 Hours; Que How To Use Photoshop 7; and Digital Darkroom.

[Caitlin]

Hi Anna! Welcome to the forum by the way!

Don't worry about being a beginner around here - everyone is really helpful. I only started photoshopping myself a few months ago, and you pick up a lot fast if you continue to read these forums!

No. 1 to learn about is adjustment layers - Attached you'll see a screenshot I've made of your picture in photoshop. Three adjustment layers - for levels, colour balance and hue/saturation(I just reduced the saturation a little)

You can only look at one adjustment layer at a time normally, but I've pasted in the color balace as well so you can see what is going on.

The benefit of doing these as layer adjustments rather than working directly on the image is you can play around with them later and change them if you like.

You can see on the levels, I have simply pulled the middle arrow towards the left, making the picture lighter and bringing out the detail. The middle arrow represents the mid-grey point in the image. The arrows on either side represent the black and white points.

In color balance I have simply moved the slider a bit away from green and towards magenta.

If this doesn't make sense just say so and I'll try to explain in more detail, or I'm sure some of the more experienced retouchers around here will chip in soon.

I worked on your retouched version, so you may be able to get even better results if you start again with your original.

What I have done is very basic - fixing the damage at the bottom of the picture will require more work.

ps. You can get a free trial version of neatimage which is good for removing excessive grain here: http://www.neatimage.com/

[Caitlin]

Hello again, I had a go at your original image, but wasn't able to get as much out of the handwriting this time just with levels.

One thing to be aware of - attachments can be up to 100k, so yours are far more compressed than they have to be. That's why a lot of jpg artifacting is coming out when I start playing with levels on the picture, and I think the jpg compression has destroyed some of the writing detail (As you can see from the attached snippet of the blue channel).

[AtlanaAnna]

You are very good at this especially since you just started a couple of months ago! I'm going to start over with my original and see what I can come up with this time. Thank you so much for your help!