Water-damaged photo - tips and techniques please?

[sulayman]

The dapper gent below is my late grandfather. I was hoping to restore and reprint the photo and frame it for my grandmother as a gift for her. Thing is, my restoration skills leave much to be desired and I was hoping that I might be able to get some tips and suggestions on how to tackle this.

The reason I'm looking for tips and input instead of having people take a stab at it is that I want to do the actual work myself. As it's a gift for my grandmother, it wouldn't feel right to have someone else do the work. I don't know if that sounds silly, but there it is all the same.

So. What advice would you fine folks give to a novice such as myself?

[philbach]

Well the first step I would recommend would be to look at the various channels using the channels palette. The red palette shows the least damage so using the channel mixer adjustment layer set to monochrome and 100% red and 0% green and blue. After that its a matter of various clone, healing, and patch techniques

[TommyO]

I like your approach to doing it yourself. You will learn alot from this image. I agree with Phil. Additionally, you're lucky in that most of the damage is in the jacket, not the face. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult to match the small pattern in the jacket as you clone/heal - it will likely twist and turn into a big mess. It may be easier in the long run to simply replace the jacket with something similar. Check a few suit manufacturer websites, find one at roughly the same angle, texture, etc. and place it on it's own layer. Erase the surrounding areas to transparency. Then transform the jacket into the right position and size.

[Verywierd]

If you want to, there is actually enough detail and clean areas on the jacket to fix it without faking it. I have done a very quick and dirty fix of the left side just as a demostration. After making a copy layer and flipping it horizontally as well as rotating it to match, I used that to fix the notch in the lapel and to bring some of the fabric texture back to that area. After that I just used the healing brush set on luminosity blending mode to fix the damage, taking care to sample and paint following the pattern of the fabric. All it needs after that is some touch up with the clone brush in the shadow and edge areas. As you can see, the fabric pattern is largly intact.

[hawkeye60]

I also used the red channel, but then I took a different approach and gave him a whole new suit. The tie could use more work, but you'll get the idea.

[sulayman]

Thanks so much for the input. Great call on inspecting the channels that didn't even occur to me. I wound up using the Black & White adjustment layer instead of the Channel Mixer one, as I felt the additional color channels would give me more control over the fine-tuning. I think my hunch was right, judging by the comparison below (left = channel mixed, right = black & white'd). I haven't done anything to the photo other than the adjustment layer.

Hawkeye - that's a phenomenal job you did. How were you able to recreate the suit so perfectly?

[Juergen D]

The jacket can probably stand some more work, but I think it is repairable. Plenty of cloning and some painting is required. I used the Channel Mixer to start out.

Juergen

[sulayman]

Back in town and finally have some time to work on the photo. I decided to take Tommy's suggestion. I just GIS'd men's suits and as luck would have it, one of the first hits had a perfect candidate.

Here's what I have so far after doing a little work. I had to do a bit of cloning and skewing to get the suit to fit the basic look of the original, but I think it's close. Much like hawkeye, it's the tie that's proving to be the trickiest bit. I really wanna preserve the tie he's wearing in the photo, because I like the design. I may wind up just painting on a brand new tie and keeping the middle bit.

One other thing -- I feel like the jacket stands out a little and looks a bit too clean. How can I "age" the suit? I gave it a subtle gaussian blur to smooth it out a bit, but I feel like there's more I can do to age it up.

[Juergen D]

I merged my earlier version with your jacket. I used a Film Grain filter on it and applied a very light Gaussian Blur.

Juergen

[Bad]

Originally Posted by philbach

Well the first step I would recommend would be to look at the various channels using the channels palette. The red palette shows the least damage so using the channel mixer adjustment layer set to monochrome and 100% red and 0% green and blue. After that its a matter of various clone, healing, and patch techniques

Hi I am new to this, what do you mean by what you say, bare with me as to I am just trying to learn Photoshop!

[philbach]

Well you have a channels palette. And you are viewing the photo in Red, Green, and Blue mode. By using the channels palette you can see the various channels individually. The red channel seems to be the best channel so then use a channels mixer adjustment layer and select monochrome and the red channel to make a black and white photo using the red channel.

So there.