How can I smooth this photo ?

[Gerald McClaren]

I would like to know how can I smooth this photo out. I would like to smooth the following: face, hands, clothes, and background etc. The face came out too white, I had tried to turn it down but it still came out too white.

Gerald McClaren

[Kraellin]

gerald,

on the face, you've over-cloned or smudged. i'd have to see the original to help you there.

on the arms and legs, take a smudge tool click it down once along one of the edges, push down and hold the shift key and move your mouse cursor where you want it next and click again. this will effectively drag the smudge from you originally clicked to the point where you clicked again and shld smooth up the line. just practice with that. do small lines around curves to get a decent curve to things.

you can also do the same thing with airbrush and the normal paint brush. just make sure your colors and shades match up first.

[Gerald McClaren]

This is the original photo.

Gerald McClaren

[Kraellin]

thanks, gerald.

not an easy picture, this one. the thing with cloning is to take small steps. dont try to do it all in one stroke. think 'very fine porcelain' or very delicate ivory carving... something along those lines. you want to not work with 100% opacity on the brush. i started this one at about 60% with a brush size of about 6 to 9... very small and very light. and from there i get smaller and lighter, for the most part.

when working with clone, i 'nibble' at the area i'm working on. and i nibble from several directions into the area i'm trying to fix. this gives you samples from all around the area and tends to blend the fixed area into the sample from area. and i almost always pick a sample from area that is close to the same shade and texture as the one i'm working on. dont try to wipe the whole area out at once... nibble it away, little by little.

you can also overlap your sample from cursor with your clone to cursor. this will give you a better overlapping effect, mostly.

if you are getting a lot of clone marks, lighten the opacity and sample from mroe areas to blend things in more. and do the overlap on the clone marks to wipe them out, little by little.

always work on a blank layer over the bad layer. check your work often by turning off this blank layer and compare it to the bad one. see if things still line up. i had to do this on your image quite a bit. it really is a tricky image. in one instance i missed a whole area of the jaw and had to go back and start that part again.

i also doubled the image size before cloning. this gives you more work space and allows for more control.

i also ran an unsharp mask at 2/100/5 before starting to sharpen things up. this helps define things better and makes cloning, in most cases, easier.

i also desaturated using an adjustment layer of hue/sat. i didnt completely desaturate, but this is a matter of taste. but, taking that yellowish hue out of there and making things more black and white, can make the transitions between shades easier to clone. you can always add this back layer by adding a bit of sepia tone or re-saturating.

all i did was the head. when i had the cloning looking pretty good, i used a bit of smudging and airbrushing to smooth things up a bit and add a bit of shading here and there.

this is one of those images that you can spend a lot of time on and is definitely a good one for practicing your cloning technique on.

[Juergen D]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

not an easy picture, this one.

I really agree with that! I did basically what Craig is describing. Started out with a Curves Adjustment layer to get some extra contrast. Then a lot of cloning in small steps. Also, a lot of filling in by painting. Sometimes I did not even know exactly what I was cloning. Are those white socks, the boy is wearing? Ran it somewhere in between through a stand alone noise filter. Placed the boy in front of a new background, made from a small part of the fence. Some contrast enhancement and just a bit of sharpening.

Juergen

[unimatrix001]

i gave this a try. started with the forehead and used the healing brush to get a small area smooth. finished the face with the patch tool. used the patch tool on the background. some cloning on the arms and legs. when finished with the retouching i used the blur tool on the face, arms, legs, and white shirt, to remove the jpeg artifacting. Hope this suits your needs.

[Lasa]

Wow everybodies clean up is great!
This is my shot at it...no healing brush at all on this one the problems were to close together it would make a mess.
Clone brush set between 50-85 semi-soft 5-8 size brush.
I tried to clone from the closest point. If I have a rip or a crease, I'll clone from just above it, then from just below it all at 50-60% and it will end up blending together.

Once done I ran a duplicate layer thru Grain Surgery and masked on the child to soften him without further bluring the background.

Lasa

[Gerald McClaren]

I thanked everyone for their input on this photo. I'll try both black and white or the yellow tone technique. The socks are white. Thanks again.


Gerald McClaren

[Lloyd]

Originally Posted by unimatrix001

i gave this a try. started with the forehead and used the healing brush to get a small area smooth. finished the face with the patch tool. used the patch tool on the background. some cloning on the arms and legs. when finished with the retouching i used the blur tool on the face, arms, legs, and white shirt, to remove the jpeg artifacting. Hope this suits your needs.

Out of interest how long did this take as the original is very broken up?

[Gerald McClaren]

This photo is about 40 yrs. old. How can I tell if a photo is color or black and white? I'm talking about the above photo for example.

Gerald McClaren