Removal of photographic paper texture

[drettig]

Hi All
yes I am new here....
I have an uneven faded color picture which I decided to transform to black and white for restoration, which by itself is not the problem
The problem is ridding the picture of the photographic paper texture (matt/bumpy..)
I tried using the FFT RGB filter to remove photographic paper texture with not much luck..
Any ideas?


Thanks
Danny

[Panpan]

Could you post the picture before your retouching please? Blurring was the best I could do with this one.

The jpeg quality of this picture is very low (around 15%). The 8x8 jpeg squares are quite visible when zooming in. When trying to get under the 100k limit to post, resizing to 800 on the long dimension will give you better overall quality.

Pierre

[drettig]

Hi Panpan
Attached is the original (before the change of color depth to 256)
Thanks
Danny

[Panpan]

The new image gave a much cleaner fft pattern.

I got rid of the dust specks with the patch tool, dealt with the edge vignetting and reduced the glass reflections.

I had to make a tradeoff between sharpening this slightly out of focus image and keeping a smooth tonal gradient.

Pierre

[Cameraken]

Hi Danny

Welcome to Retouch Pro.

When you paint out the stars in the FFT you only need to paint out the six stars closest to the centre star. (In this case)

I have not used Neat Image or sharpened this. Just so you can see what FFT has done.

The colour is from your second post.

Ken.

[drettig]

Hi Ken
Thanks - looks great.
How did you get SO much color back?
I keep playing with the levels but I don't get the same results
Danny

[bart_hickman]

First thing I did was the FFT trick--to get rid of all of the pattern you have to kill EVERY star away from the center axes. Even then, there was a horizontal line pattern with periodicity of about 7 pixels. 7 pixels shows up as spurs (aka stars) along the axis at about 2/7 and 4/7 (and 6/7) of the way from the center to the edge along the center vertical axis (this is a bunch of DSP gobbeldegook.) So I gently attenuated those stars as well with a very small soft brush and that took care of the horizontal lines.

Then, I'm embarrased to say, I used the PSP9 automatic photo fix script. Followed by PSP NR tool, although I partially protected the colors of the faces because they weren't very noisy. If I did it again, I might protect the red stripes on her shirt a little better (I didn't notice they got clobbered until just now. I'm not so great at color recovery--still working on it.)

Did some cloning along the top, and color cloning around the sides and bottom. White-balanced their shirts (assumed his shirt was white--pushed things a bit towards blue just because it looks better.)

Did a high-pass sharpening and finally removed some specks with the makeover tool.

Sound like a lot of stuff. Took 25 minutes (biggest chunk of time spent on the FFT and fixing the wall along the top)

The banding around the edges is FFT artifacts--I think I've seen a technique elsewhere on how to avoid that, but I haven't taken the time yet to see what it is.

Bart

[sarbeka]

Hi All . you must open the picture in the photoshop, 1st. you open the curves
ctrl. + M.......in the curves there is the options window,click on it, you get Auto color correction options, lighten the find dark &light colors and snap natural midtones, click ok and click ok on the curves window you will see the deference. 2nd.take the Blur Tool ,begin with brush size 20% ,by passing the cursur on the face you will see how its working,when u finish the face.. 2nd.you take the burn tool and pass over the hair as you see it on the pict # 2 i worked half on it and ansd work on the colours ..by training you get what you need.this took 15 minutes. hope i helped you.

sarbeka

[byRo]

Originally Posted by bart_hickman

...there was a horizontal line pattern with periodicity of about 7 pixels. 7 pixels shows up as spurs (aka stars) along the axis at about 2/7 and 4/7 (and 6/7) of the way from the center to the edge along the center vertical axis (this is a bunch of DSP gobbeldegook.)

I've been thinking about writing a second FFT tutorial, which would include this technique of predicting where the stars will be. Maybe now I'll get round to it.

Originally Posted by bart_hickman

...The banding around the edges is FFT artifacts--I think I've seen a technique elsewhere on how to avoid that...

Just put in an "average" colour border around the image before FFT, and chop it off after.

Rô

[bart_hickman]

Duh on me! Right out of my college textbook.

Bart