Repairing a torn corner

[AtlanaAnna]

I'm attaching a picture that is torn in the corner so the shoulder of the subject is missing. I'm also attaching my attempt to repair the image which I don't like at all. I tried to draw in a shoulder and tried to pick up the tones of the blouse from areas that were available using the clone stamp. Any suggestions as to how to approach this problem?

Thank you,
Sylvia Morris

[philbach]

Well the signature was a problem in the torn corner. Before I restored the photo I placed the signature on a separate layer to get it out of the way.

[AtlanaAnna]

This looks great! What technique did you use and the part about moving the handwritten note to another layer is over my head. How did you accomplish that?

Thank you!
Sylvia

[philbach]

Well I decided that I needed to get the signature out of the way so I could work on the rest of the picture.
With the selection marquee I selected the area of the signature and then copied that to a new layer.
The next step was to separate the white of the paper from the black of the signature.
So I used an overlay blending mode on the copied layer to increase the contrast.
Next I used a levels to further increase the contrast of the copied layer.
I then merged these layers into a new layer.
On top of that layer I placed a trace layer and filled in some blank spots with a black, small, hard pen.

The last step was to eleminate the white. I did this by using a layer blending mode on the signature layer and used advanced options and decreased the white slider on "this layer" to about 235 from 255. That only left pixels that were 244 of luminosity or less. I could have just used levels or curves too.

I then converted all of those extra layers into one layer; locked the layer; and turned off its visibility so I wouldn't mess with it when I went back to the picture.

[AtlanaAnna]

Okay, I must try all this myself and see if I can do it.

[Kraellin]

this is all clone and push. nothing else. oh, and i just worked on the corner. nothing else.

Craig