photo restoration sample

[dicri]

Hi,

I'm new here but hopefully I will become a familiar face. I want to get some feedback on a photo I resently restored that was damaged in a fire, just a bit of soot that wouldn't come off and it also had some tears in it from previous times. My daughter made me add some color to it for fun too. This is the 1st photo that I've restored that was really damaged, normally, I just play with touching things up and a little contrast here and there.
Let me know what you think!!!

Thanks,
Christine

[dicri]

Forgot to mention, it took about 2 hours and the original is 8" by 7 (I think). I'ld put the entire image up but I think they would be too big.

[Kraellin]

hi christine,

welcome to RP

looks good. but a bit smaller than we like here. if you could post it more towards the 600 x 800 size that would be a bit easier for folks to critique. otherwise folks have to load them into their own paint programs and zoom in to see them.

make a copy of your originals and resize them. keep them in .jpg format and bring the compression around to where you are just under 100k in file size (the limit on the normal forums). you lose a bit of detail this way, but mostly it's ok for just letting others see what's going on.

craig

[dicri]

hope this is better

[Kraellin]

christine,

much better, thank you!

you've done a very nice job of cleaning things up here. so, well done on that!

i'm not a big fan of colorizing black and whites, but that's a personal preference that's partially swayed by the fact that i'm not that good in doing this myself, so, ok the parts you have done this way look fine. i'd be very tempted at this point to continue, especially on the skin areas. add some reds back in to give her a bit of tone. but again, this is a preference thing. the bits you have done look fine.

the dress looks a bit odd, almost as if it were made of paper. the shading needs to be checked. maybe a bit of light smudging to smooth these out. i believe part of this effect is from how you cleaned the image and the bends and tears that were there. there looks to be still some crease marks showing through or something. these shld be evened out a bit or smoothed over. the trick is in doing this without losing texture or color. clone, heal, push, smudge, and the makeover tool (similar to heal in ps) are the tools i use for this. you might also accomplish this with a duplicate layer, a mask, a blending mode and some blur. but i believe i'd go with the hand tools. you could also try the 'smooth' brush, the lighten/darken brush, or maybe even another of the brush types. use low opacities on the brushes to start to see how they are going to affect things.

there is a dark area in the background, next to her face on our right side, that doesnt look very good. i'd smooth/clone this out and blend it in with the rest of the color and luminosity of the background. it appears to be an old soot mark that wasnt taken completely out.

there are also some shadows on her face, on her right cheek and jaw that seem a bit uneven, blotchy. a small opacity smudge would even those out.

it's a darling picture and despite what might seem like a lot of criticisms here, you've done a very good job!

craig

[bart_hickman]

The folds and bends in the original can be largely removed by scanning the photo a second time rotated 180 degrees and then combining them in photoshop. You'll still need to get rid of the really sharp creases, but the other shading errors will disappear.

Bart

[Billfields]

Hello Christine,

You have made a great start! With respect to the restoration there is little I can add to what Craig has said.

But in terms of the color (With a nod and smile to Craig ... I really like adding color to old pictures. I'm better at that than doing the actual repairs) I would either do something more with the rest of the skin and hair or leave the lips uncolored as well. You can achieve a nice effect with the blue dress and the blue eyes but adding the pink to the lips somehow throws that out of kilter. Of course this is just my opinion.

Frankly I would color all of the skin and hair then adjust the opaqueness of those levels to achieve a more subtle color in the skin and hair if you wish. Building on your work I did a quick tint of just the face and hair to give you an idea. I spent about 10 minutes on this so it is sloppy. If it were me from start I would probably do a bit more with the eyes. If you look closely, eyes are often several colors. The same is true of skin. You get more realistic looking skin tones if you layer in several colors using a soft brush set to a low opacity and flow (I use settings of about 19 for each but it depends on the color and the picture) In this I used four different layers, one a skin tone, one a blue, one a yellow and one a pink. I sometimes use several more. And I would fiddle a bit more with the lips and teeth Anyway, once colored you can merge the various layers into one "skin" (I would keep the "skin" layer separate from the "hair" layer) and adjust the opacity settings to get the degree of color that suits your preference.

You might also want to play around with various blending modes for the blue of the dress to try and tone down the "neon" look.

Again, good work.

Bill

[philbach]

I just took Billfield's nice colorization and added more saturation to the colors

[Billfields]

Phil,

I think this is a photo that lends itself very well to coloring and what you did looks great. I think your version is better than what I did. I was trying to keep it toned down because I thought Christine was trying to avoid too much color. I think you've added some color to the arms and legs too---I didn't do them.

Bill

[philbach]

Yes I colored the legs but the rest was done by using your work, photo and increasing the saturation.

[dicri]

Thanks everyone for your replies and ideas on how to improve what I've done... I've been looking at and trying a few of the challenges. And I thought this one was difficult. The restoration others do on this site do just blows me away!

[Kraellin]

you're welcome

craig