Tintype (?) Scanned Image

[AtlanaAnna]

Wow! I'm impressed with how far everyone brought this picture. I want to go to Photoshop Bootcamp somewhere / anywhere! This is a great group but I think I would benefit even more if I had more of a foundation to build on.

[Drach]

Hiya all

First post for me. I was browsing the board the last few days and this thread caught my attention.
Out of all the pictures around this one was my no.1 choice to check what I can do with such pictures.
So what do you think? Any ideas for improvement?
_______
Drach

[BillD]

That is simply amazing. I wish I knew enought to get this picture to this point. Very nice work. Did you do this is just PS or did you use other programs/plug-ins?
Thanks for the post and the help. I just have to learn how to do this. My friend is going to be very happy.

[Drach]

Not sure if you pointed that last post at me, but I used only PS with standard filters.

I used layer-shifting to eliminate those ugly lines. Drawback is, that the image becomes a little blurry, but it wasn't that bad in this case. There was still some distortion which I got rid of with a very slight gaussian blur.
Now it's even more unsharp (still not too bad), but a little trick helps here. Since the background has no important detail, the best bet is to blur it more than the child. By doing so the child appears sharper than it really is
The rest is more or less shifting around curves and some painting (well, the paintwork was done before the bluring, but you get the point ).

I guess that's some very unusual technique and I know it doesn't work always, but I consider myself still a newbie so I think that's ok

[Cameraken]

Drach

Welcome to RetouchPro

You wanted “Any ideas for improvement”. Well after all that work and the excellent job on the hair I cannot understand why you have not punched up the levels a little. Also you could have used the right eye to improve the left. But this is nit picking and you have done an absolutely excellent job.

This may be your first posting here but obviously not your first retouching project.

If you have done this all in Photoshop then you have got an amazing result.

If you look back in this thread I have used FFT (Fourier Transform) to remove the texture from this image. You say you have used “layer-shifting to eliminate those ugly lines”. Well I did a Google search on layer shifting and got a load of geology sites – Nothing about Photoshop.

It sounds like you have made some sort of mask to eliminate the texture’ If that is the case then I (for one) would be very interested in your Method.


Ken

[Drach]

Thanks for the welcome

I played around with the levels, but this looked best to me. Anyway I'll try around some more and will try to work on the eye.

I guess layer-shifting isn't the right word, but that was my best translation for it
I duplicated the layer, set transparency of the top-layer to 50% and shifted it (2 up and 1 left I think it was). This also works nicely on high-res scans, where you can almost see the printed dots

Actually this was my first real retouching work if we're talking about restoring old photos, tho I'm doing graphics a pretty long time and made a lot forum signatures in the past years (I was playing MMOs a lot). I guess that helped a lot

[Cameraken]

Drach

Thanks for explaining your method. I have done some tests and FFT is the winner.

The first problem with your method is that you are distorting the image slightly (1 or 2 pixels)

Second you have to do further blurring to remove the remaining texture.

I am attaching two samples. The first is layer-stretched and levels. The second is FFT and levels.


Ken