her daughter died of cancer (Help me)

[pixeltickler]

Hi All,

I haven't been around in a year and I wasn't a big poster before that so most of you won't know me, but I hope you'll help anyway.

Ok long story short. I've been working as a Notary and I went to this sweet, gentle old lady's house to sign some papers and up on the wall were tons of pictures of her and her descendants all the people reoccured several times except one -- I only saw one of this particular girl and the picture was sun faded or somehow altered the colors. I asker her about the picture and she said it was her daughter who had died from cancer. Now I knew why there was only one picture of her. Any way I offered to take the picture home and see if I could restore it for her. No charge to her just to see if I could do it. Well I hate to say I've been away from photoshop so long that I am a bit out of my depth here. I'm attaching the orignal scan and the adjustments I've been able to make but it's not good enough. her forehead is all washed out and I don't know where to go from here... so please help me. What am I missing. I didn't do anything fancy here just added a few adjustment layers in levels, curves and hue/sat.

http://othelaproperties.com/mrstomeydaughter.jpg
http://othelaproperties.com/mrstomey...r_adjusted.jpg

The banding just showed up in the jpg versions of this pic but isn't in my psd version.

So here I sit awaiting the brilliance of y'all.

Thanks in advance

Diane (the pixeltickler)

[PatrickB]

I must admit, I am not into restoration at all, but had to have a go at this one.

Here is mine, it's very basic, but will maybe help you.

What I did:

Adjusted the colors by using curves, using the neutral color picker somewhere in the background of the image.
Used a multiply layer to bring back the contrast to the picture.
And finally used a masked screen layer to lighten up the hair.

Maybe you like it that way but others can do better for sure!

Patrick

[pixeltickler]

Thank you Patrick. You got much better tone in the face than I did. What do your numbers look like on your adjustment layers? Oh and for anyone else that wants to give this a whack, per her mother that shirt is yellow.

Thanks to all who assist. The gods will bless you in their own way!
Diane (the pixeltickler)

[Duv]

I made the assumption that the band around the picture was the actual tone and that the rest of the picture had a cyan cast. Basically, I applied a filter which was the opposite of cyan and adjusted. Added a bit of my own color to the eyes, not sure what the originals were like.

Cheers
Dave

[pixeltickler]

Thanks Dave,

Nope I think that outer band is supposed to be white. And her mom said her eyes were hazel. But awsome anyway.

Diane

[Hephaestos]

Here I just set the black and white points on a curves adjustment. There was still a slight cyan cast so I raised red channel brightness to compensate.

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Diane, Had to have a go with this one.

[Flora]

Hi everybody,

Diane,

I also had to have a go ...
What realaqu said about having friends like you ...

I tried to change as little as possible to keep the picture as this Lady has seen it and got used to all this time .... I have removed the white border ... but it would be no problem at all to 'put it back' ....

Take care

[pixeltickler]

Heph, Realaqu, Gary and Flora,



You guys ar all awe inspiring to me! Thank you so much for your takes.

Heph I did that too except the part about removing the Cyan cast with the red channel boost; how does one do that exactly?

Realaqu, Gary Flora! WOW!!! but a little description on what you did would help me recreate it, pretty pleaaaasssse.

Flora how did you get such amazing skin tone specifically. And her hair is perfect what did you do? I repeat you are amazing, but I wanna learn to

Gary you got the background and around the edge perfect. what did you do? I don't see and of the odd colour anomalies I was having. Teach me oh sage ones.

Thank you all so much for your help! I am truly humbled when I come here.

Diane

[realaqu]

Inspired by Floria's amazing work

I started this project from the very begining, somebody could give me a hand to improve my work. thanks

realaqu

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Diane,

Didn't do too much. Did a rectangular selection on the good area. Select/Inverse
to change selection to border area.

Now did a levels adj to even out tone. This caused some discolouration in some areas. So created a new layer, using clone tool set to colour, cloned out discoloured areas using colour from good areas (had to adjust Opacity of clone tool to get reasonable blend). Clone tool to normal, and cloned out areas that still showed.

Flattened image, then used a levels adj layer to colour correct and improve contrast.

Lastly, created new layer. set blend mode to colour, and coloured skin a little with a tone taken from one of Bruce Beard's charts. Adjusted layer Opacity for effect.

Ditto hair.

Evened out background colour in similar manner.

Hope this helps.


Realaqu, there's no improvement needed on your image, really good work.

[berwin]

Hello Diane,

My heart goes out for the young lady and her mother. She inspired me to feel for her. I worked on the full res image and it is still on my HD, in case you need it.

Started with FFT to get rid of the pattern. Adjusted Levels and curves in 16bit. Made tons of local adjustments, lots of layers and layer masks too numerous to mention.

Greetings,

berwin

[Flora]

Hi everybody,

thanks for your kind words!!!

Great jobs evryone!

This picture had texture, was faded and the colours were 'off' ...

After running it through the FFT filter to remove the texture (here you can find ByRo's excellent Tutorial on how to use it and the link to where download it) and enhancing details by balancing shadows/highlights (different ways for doing this are described in this Tutorial) I did the following:

1. Used the Curves 'Set Grey Point' on the background (my right of the picture) close to the top of her head ... This improved things a lot ... removed the cyan cast and brought back some of the original colour.
   
   
2. After that, I selectively (by this I mean loosely select the part I want to work on with the Lasso Tool) used Levels and Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layers for improving tone and contrast ... and Hue/Saturation, Color Balance and Selective Colors Adjustment Layers for correcting and enhancing the colours .... skin included...
   
   
3. Hue/Saturation on her eyes ...

All the corrections I do, be it for tone and contrast or for colours, I do 'by eye' meaning I move the sliders untils it looks OK ... If Hue/Saturation doesn't satisfy me, I try Selective Colors, Color Balance, Levels or Curves, in other words I try everything until I'm satisfied with what I see on my monitor ... That's why it's sometimes difficult to explain exactly how I got to a particular result ....

Still ... I hope this helps ....

[realaqu]

Thanks Gary,

I just feel I should do a better work than this one after watching Flora's job. but just dont have any idea to improve it, it looks ok, but it is not indeed.

realaqu

[Flora]

realaqu,

I think you did a beautiful job! Her skin colour is just great!!

The couple of things I noticed are too strong contrast/shadows ... because of it you lost most details in her hair ....

The skin in her face is partially too smooth/blurred, lacking texture ...

Her left eye is too dark in comparison with the right one ...

[realaqu]

Thank you Flora

That is exactly what I need, everytime I read your post, I always learned soemthing new. I will do it again


realaqu

[Cameraken]

Everyone seems to like Floras picture but is anyone a little disappointed with Floras instructions?
Hey! We got the starting picture and the finished picture and some rough instructions.
We could work through the steps together and maybe all learn something.

If anyone is interested I’ll start off with an attempt at Step1

(assuming you have downloaded mrstomeydaughter.jpg provided by Pixeltickler)

Step 1 – remove the texture
Download and install FFT from Floras link above.
Using the soft round brush (size 35) paint out the stars as in the attachment with black paint.

You should now have no texture showing on the picture.

OK. Anyone want to attempt step 2?
Don’t forget to post your settings then we can follow.


Ken.

[Duv]

Here's another rendition with the skin tones changed to 8% cyan, 38% magenta, 40% yellow and 0 black.

Cheers
Dave

[pixeltickler]

Hey, hey All,

Ok I got it done to my satisfaction more or less; Thanks to EVERYONE who posted! I mean it. There was a tear in this dear lady's eye when I dropped this off this morning. It wasn't perfect, but I was indeed happy with the results. I used suggestions from EVERYONE. Following are the results I got. Bless you all, there is an amazing place in heaven for those that help just because they can.

Diane (the pixeltickler)

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Diane,

Lovely picture, so glad to hear that the lady was pleased with your efforts, that surely makes it all worthwhile.

Glad we could help in some small way.

Gary.

[Flora]

Diane,

what you did is simply great! ... A great restoration and even greater kindness and consideration for the Lady!!!

Dave,

It might be my monitor, but her skin looks a bit too 'yellow/orange' ....

Ken,

nit-picking? .... Ok ... let's do it!

Originally Posted by Cameraken

Step 1 – remove the texture
Download and install FFT from Floras link above.
Using the soft round brush (size 35) paint out the stars as in the attachment with black paint.

You should now have no texture showing on the picture.

*.... After this I get a greyscale picture .... How do I get the colours back?

*When I run FFT I don't get an image like yours ... and I don't see any stars ... What am I doing wrong?

*Why do I get 'ringing' along the edges? ...

*There are so many 'stars' .... why paint black only six and those six ?

*I followed your instructions, but still have some texture in my picture ... can you explain why?

*After following your explanation my 'original' picture has disappeared ...

Etc. ....

....As you can see, 'detailed explanations' don't come easy ... but hey, how should I know .... I am the one with the disappointing "rough instructions" ...

One last thing ...

We could work through the steps together and maybe all learn something.

.... and if there were no steps, or, in my opinion, the instructions available were 'rough' ... I learnt by making my own steps ....

[Caitlin]

Excellent job Diane! I think you've got the original colouring spot on!

[realaqu]

Great job, Diane,

That is the reason why I love retouchpro. not just because I got so many great teachers in here and learned a lot from them, but also enjoy staying with those true warm hearted people.

bless your friend

Realaqu

[Lorraine]

I came in too late on this thread to submit my version. The story touched me deeply. Congratulations, Diane, for the excellent restoration.

Lorraine

[Cameraken]

Thanks Flora. OK I learnt my lesson. But is seemed like a good idea in this particular thread with a good hi-res picture to work from, and a few contributors who seemed to know what they were doing. I did think about problems like you mentioned but thought I could refer back to byRo’s tutorial for the FFT and then your tutorial for the fading. After that I may have learned from someone else as I get stuck.
The whole point was to try and work through this without your help and make everyone think about the next step.

I am coming here to learn. At the moment my ambition is to equal your work. But I won’t stop there.

One question.
I have posted my picture (which I am fairly happy with) but I had several goes at this. If I repair the picture in CMYK (replacing the damaged cyan channel with the Yellow) then her blouse comes out Pink But if I do it in RGB and repair the damaged Blue channel with Green then her blouse is Yellow. Why the bid difference? And how do you know what is correct?
Duv works in CMYK but got the blouse orange.


Ken.

[Kraellin]

ken,

rather than replacing the various channels, you might try something like the channel mixer tool and simply adjust each channel in a mix and match fashion.

Craig

[realaqu]

ken

I try to practiced with your image, with one color balance layer and one selective color layer. try to remove those green aruond her hair on the mask of selective adjustment layer. the last step is some regular adjustment like contrast and her eyes, teeth etc.

realaqu

[Cameraken]

Kraellin
Thanks for that suggestion. Its amazing how much there is in photoshop. Replacing a complete channel is a bit drastic and I’ve just had a play with the channel mixer and I can virtually repair the channel. That’s one for the memory Bank. Thanks.

I’ve been playing around quite a lot with these faded photos recently. I was under the impression that if the photo had faded uniformly then a simple colour adjustment would put everything right. But this clearly is not the case. I suppose that the different coloured photo dyes must fade differently.

Looking at this photo the face and the blouse are fairly similar so if you make the face pinkish then it makes sense to me that the blouse could be fairly pinkish.

I remember you mentioned the channel mixer in the ‘Ghostly image’ thread that Deadants posted. That was a great picture I was convinced there was a dog in that picture until Flora decided it was a plant. (I wasn’t an active member then)

I’ve just found this posted by Stroker

“Variation that someone once referred to as 'Interactive Channel Mixer'. Wish I could remember whom I heard this from.

Start a new Layer Set.
Cut and Paste G and B into the Set.
Right-click Set > Layer Set Properties.
Turn off G and B channels.

You can now mix G and B into R in any manner that you want.
Blending modes, Opacity, and any adjustment layers that strike yer fancy.
Why, you can even lower the Opacity of the Set itself.

Takes practice and some fiddling, but it's a fairly solid technique with tweaks galore”


Ken.

[Cameraken]

Realaqu
No problem play away. I have done this with NO selective areas and No painting (except the mark on her nose and 2 spots of blue in the background)

All I did was replace the yellow channel then adjust with curves

What do you think of the colour?

Ken.

[realaqu]

Ken

The color is great, I just thought the picture looks a little bit flat.

realaqu