Overexposed Baby Head (newbie posting)

[ziblets]

Hi - first I want to say a big Thank You to everyone here. All these years I've just been buying books and trying to figure everything out by myself! RP is just wonderful!
That said, I have this photo I have been trying to fix off-and-on about 2 years. I keep going back to the drawing board. This is a scan of a 30 year old slide photo of a baby. The film was overexposed over the top part of the image and her face. I finally found a book that addressed the problem but when I went to follow the instructions, I didn't have the same options in my software for this particular type of fix
I've come to the conclusion that I just don't know how to work with color channel adjustments, and I hope some of you experts can give me some pointers! I have PSCS and Elements2 (Mac) if that helps. I am also not adverse to desaturating and "hand" colorizing if that's what it takes to get the facial details back. Thanks in advance!

[Frank Lopes]

Welcome aboard!!!

The photo that you posted is not that easy to fix. It is, however, possible to bring it to a much more acceptable state.

I'm not familiar with the capabilities of Elements2 (Mac).
In Photoshop, you have the ability to manipulate the individual channels: red, green and blue (if you are working in RGB mode which is my guess).

If you look at the individual channels you will see that the blue channel actually retained a lot of detail in the over-exposed area.

One way to fix this photo (I'm sure other more experienced members will have much better ideas :-), will be to copy the blue channel on top of the image as another layer and then work on it with color.

See my example below: the original, the blue channel and the copy of the blue channel on top of the original

Originally Posted by ziblets

Hi - first I want to say a big Thank You to everyone here. All these years I've just been buying books and trying to figure everything out by myself! RP is just wonderful!
That said, I have this photo I have been trying to fix off-and-on about 2 years. I keep going back to the drawing board. This is a scan of a 30 year old slide photo of a baby. The film was overexposed over the top part of the image and her face. I finally found a book that addressed the problem but when I went to follow the instructions, I didn't have the same options in my software for this particular type of fix
I've come to the conclusion that I just don't know how to work with color channel adjustments, and I hope some of you experts can give me some pointers! I have PSCS and Elements2 (Mac) if that helps. I am also not adverse to desaturating and "hand" colorizing if that's what it takes to get the facial details back. Thanks in advance!

[Lasa]

Wow haven't see a noexisting red...so I made a grey scale from the blue channel then used the dodge/burned it to even it out a little...

Lasa

[Daviskw]

Hi there

I'm afraid I did not have too much luck either

I switched to lab and tried to even luminosity in the lightness channel

Copied the lightness channel then combined it with the original masking the yellow out. Then added color on color layers to the bad areas. There was lots of noise in the face too much to make out much detail. I smoothed with a smudge brush and added some noise back..not good at adding back detail but someone with a little artistic talent could.

Butch

[ziblets]

You have no idea how excited I am!
I split the photo into two layers, one light and one dark, removed the red and green and softened the edges of each where they meet. Then, I found another slide of the same baby and used free transform to get it more face-forward, resized it, worked it a bit with healing brush and softened the edges. I put this layer on top at 25% opacity and she's really shaping up!
I could really use some pointers on fixing the light/dark edges. When I was trying to use dodge/burn it was only getting darker (yuck). Do I need to make this grey scale channel first, and if so how can I do that?
(I'm so happy I can hardly type!)

[ziblets]

Actually I guess I could be a little happier if I had saved that with only a blue channel so it would display properly

[ziblets]

Here it is. I greyscaled the sample.

[Frank Lopes]

There is hope after all :-)

Originally Posted by ziblets

Here it is. I greyscaled the sample.

[ziblets]

I can't thank you all enough for pointing me in the right direction. I'm going to keep working on cleaning it up.
Thank you, thank you

[grannysdc]

Looks like you are doing excellent on your way towards solving your problem..

Looks like I am a lil late but here is my feeble quick attempt anyway..

Used a couple hue/saturation layers to go from color to black N white to get as close to each other as possible.. then used history brush multiply and screen to match the top and bottom.. Good Luck!

[DCobb]

I just wanted to give this a try. My colorization skills are not.

dc

[Lasa]

If you use the burn use it at 5% or 6% and let it slowly building from the information at hand. The dodge simply lightens but again at 5% and slowying match the shade.

Can you post the picture you got the eyes from?

Lasa

[Daviskw]

Hi I tried one more from the original post... glad things are working out.

Butch

[ziblets]

Hi Lasa,
Here is the file from which I got the eyes.

[Lasa]

That's great..you know you could probably take body from picture 1 and the head from picture 2 and place it on a 3rd background in the middle of a park fairly easy...and have it look pretty good.

Lasa

[CJ Swartz]

This is one of those areas where I need more practice, and this child is too cute to resist working with, so here's my effort to combine the face from the bath with the original. (I really tried all the channels of the original, thinking that CMYK or LAB would help, but that light damage to the top part of the photo was brutal to every channel.)

[Kraellin]

ziblets, welcome to RP.

this was a LOT of work. there just was not enough definition left to do much with it in native rgb mode. i had to borrow from the blue channel as some of the others did. i also masked off the top overexposed area and did some work separately there. some of the parts i borrowed on the face i had to duplicate and set the layer to multiply to get enough detail to work with. and one part in there i think i set to luminance, just the black and white part borrowed from the blue. again, this was to get some definition in there.

there was also a LOT of clone, push (smudge) and airbrush. i basically had to reconstruct parts of the face and due to some treatments i used, i had to also remove quite a bit of resulting shadowing.

there were a couple 'clarify' filters in there and a couple of usm's as well. i could never tell you the exact steps and i'm sorry about that. i know you want to learn.

i also pretty much destroyed the background where the overexposure was, so i simply used the bottom part to clone in the top part. i also cropped the picture to an 8 x 10 format.

i had to 'find' the eyes with things like clarify and usm and then had to paint in some detail using what i found as a model.

at one point when i had some detail back in the face, i borrowed the original mouth and surrounding area due to darkening that area with other things. i just did a cut and paste from the original back into the layer i was on and then blended it in with clone and push and airbrush.

no telling how many times i had to back up in my history and redo things. thank god for undo and redo.

there was also some 'soften' in there for when i screwed up the background and had to re-blend the foreground into the new background.

and there was also some 'lighten/darken' on the face to get it lighter but to leave the shadows there.

normally, i would have also at least doubled the image size before working, but for whatever reason, i didnt on this one.

i spent about 3 hours on this. it was a tough piece for me. flora could probably do it in 15 minutes and do it twice as good

[Kraellin]

and, as almost always happens, i look at this now that i've posted it and realized that i probably got the eyes looking the wrong way. having gone back and looked at the blue channel again, i think they are looking straight forward, but this wouldnt be too hard to correct now.

[ziblets]

I'm going to have to investigate and work on some of these techniques. I see references to 'usm' - not sure what that is?
Don't feel bad about not being able to offer the steps - it's the same with me, lots of trial and error, undo, redo, delete history, several copies of layers... just noting basics has been extremely helpful. And I keep saying this but I do truly appreciate everyone's hard work and input.
My plan is to print this out when it's complete and give it as a gift to my mother. I remember when the photo first came back from being developed and how disappointed she was that it didn't turn out... the baby is my sister

[Kraellin]

hi ziblets,

'usm' is 'unsharp mask'. it shld be in your 'sharpen' menu or wherever photoshop puts it. paint shop pro and photoshop both have this. it's also why the ground looks like metal somewhat

[ziblets]

I should have known that. Thanks!

[ShellBen]

Very hard photo to salvage without making it look unatural, or unfamiliar, but I tried it out. I used selective color and adjusted the blacks and neutrals, smart sharpen, paint daubs, smudge, burn, dodge, used a tablet to draw over features and bring them out more. I just threw a whole bunch of stuff on it, hehe.