Help! B&W w/severe all over dirt/grunge

[photocrazy]

Hi! I'm very new here -- I'm going to try to attach a very small patch of a photo I'm trying to help for a woman my husband works with. The damage to this 8x10 is much more severe in other places, but I can deal mostly with that -- the problem is this all-over 'dirty' look -- seems to be in cracks -- thought at first was paper grain -- but not that regular. I've mostly worked on the faces (not shown here -- this is the original) and had to very painstakingly worked with clone -- the healing brushes are often fooled by the amount of 'tone' contained in the cracks. Would probably be easier if the picture itself was color;-)

Ideas? Somewhere I read in the forums a suggestion for 'screening' when scanning -- what does that accomplish? Also, what does a 'high-pass' filter do?

Thanks for any ideas!

[photocrazy]

Thought you might like to see the whole picture -- see if I can do this successfully (get the picture to upload and display)! This is the only picture the lady has when she and her twin sister were young -- about 50 years ago.

[duwayne]

Tough photo! I played with the part face and got reasonable results. Should be acceptable given it's such a small part of the overall image. It took a HEAVY dose of NeatImage (filter=remove all noise) to get this result. Then moderate Unsharp Mask and Add Noise. Maybe backing off to 75% of Remove All Noise in NeatImage would work better.

[DCobb]

This is my try. Photo certainly belongs in the cute kids department.
-healing brush
-clone tool
-patch tool
-levels adjustment
-selective degrunge using the tutorial from this site.
-Kodak (third party plugin) airbrush


dc

[photocrazy]

WOW -- you two are amazing -- giving me new hope!!! I had started looking at the Neat Image site and I will definitely go back. Interesting I had also looked at the degrunge tutorial and played a little with airbrush -- will go revist these items in more depth. Don't know that I'll get to these great results quickly -- and I may 'knock on your door' if it get stuck.

Thanks so much!

[Kraellin]

welcome to RP, photocrazy.

here's another approach:

duplicate the background layer.

run polaroid's dust and scratch remover on the black mode.

mask out the catchlights of her eyes and few other light areas you want to save and then run the polaroid filter again in white mode.

that will give you a fair cleanup of the splotchiness of the skin.

after that you can do any number of extra treatments. i ran a bit of clone, a bit desaturating, some fade correction, a usm (unsharp mask) filter for sharpening, a bit of airbrushing and a contrast/brightness adjustment layer.

[chillin]

I applied Noiseware Pro, Curve Adj, byro's razor sharpening, some more selective level adj.

[photocrazy]

Thank you Kraellin and chillin! Looks like I have more plugins to investigate. I've always been nervous about downloading extra's, but I'm going to give it a try. I've been spinning my wheels on this one -- now I have a push to go farther.

Thanks!

[zekeode]

I have tried the noise ninja, neat image demos etc...and never really get good results with them. I have found the "digital camera noise removal" on PSP photo XI pretty useful. To me it's worth the price, even if you only use the noise removal part of it.

Anyway here is what i did

Duplicate -> Digital Camera noise removal -> mask -> brushing outlines (keeping the image sharp where it's required)
Cloning (there wasn't much left after noise removal)
Levels
Sharpening

I'm not sure if i went too far removing the noise.

[photocrazy]

Thanks zekeode -- this looks great, too! Is 'PSP photoXI' a full editing program? or some kind of plug in? Any ballpark of the price?
Was the mask done to keep the 'digital camera noise removal' from working on the outlines, or was that after the noise removal and before the following steps?
I've been amazed that all the examples posted have kept so much good shading/shape of the face and the detail.

Thanks again!

[jeswilky]

When you do the de-screening mode when scanning all it really does is blur the picture therefore kind of blending the cracks together. I would scan the picture in as normal and then go to my Channels and click on red, green, and blue to see which one drops out the most color yet still retains enough detail. Find the one that drops the most color out and then delete the rest of the channels. After you get done doing this you'll have to go to your Image menu and change the Mode to Grayscale, then to RGB to get your channels back. Another thing that works well is using the stamp tool with the mode set to darken or lighten depending on the area you are working on. If you select the lighten mode and take a sample of a nearby area and then run your stamp tool over the crack it will only fix the areas that are darker than the spot you sampled. Then use your healing tool to blend the rest in.

[zekeode]

Originally Posted by photocrazy

Thanks zekeode -- this looks great, too! Is 'PSP photoXI' a full editing program? or some kind of plug in? Any ballpark of the price?

It's a shortening from Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo XI,
http://www.corel.com/ and it's a full featured editing software. To me it has an easy learning curve and the price is right. (something like $80-100 over USA?)

Was the mask done to keep the 'digital camera noise removal' from working on the outlines, or was that after the noise removal and before the following steps?

First you need to duplicate layer, then add digital camera noise removal to copied layer, then adding mask, and painting over the parts you want to keep sharp/detailed. Maybe there is someone that could point out tutorial for that(?) I'm not very good giving detailed info, as English isn't my native language, and technical words isn't my strongest side.