Orange Spots

[Liz]

Attached is a very damaged polaroid. I have at least 30 of these to fix. Most of them have these fluroescent orange dots all over them.

I read (studied) this post
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/pho...nge-spots.html

I've tried to use the techniques described here, but not getting much luck. Could be that I'm not understanding all the steps.

I'm wondering if someone would have the time to give it a go, then walk me through their process.

[TommyO]

Liz,
I don't have enough time to do much with it, but here is one thought process.
After looking at the color values for the spots, they are quite bright. Very close to the mid-levels of the sky. But, they share nothing with the foreground.
So, we can isolate the spots (along with the sky) by taking advantage of techniques that isolate bright from not bright. You can do this with something as simple as a Threshold adjustment layer, to complex as a Gradient Mask. I chose the threshold adj. layer.

Here is the result of that layer. It can easily be converted into a mask, then some other adjustments applied to fill the holes with other colors.... even simply sample and paint with adjacent colors. I found that the value of the threshold was very sensitive, a value of "1" making a lot of difference... I settled on 195. The actual result looks much more useful than the thumbnail, but you get the picture.

Hope this is helpful. Sorry for the rush.

[lurch]

Liz, you've attached a gif image that comes without channels, which make masking for all of those orange spots more effective. Please post a jpg.

[Liz]

Oh! Sorry about that. Here's a jpeg.

[Kraellin]

i kind of like tommy's suggestion of using a threshhold to make a mask on this, but i'm an old fart and set in my ways, so i'd probably try a magic wand on the pink to see if i could make a selection directly and if not, then i'd probably just airbrush, clone and smudge all on a separate blank layer.

[Liz]

Thank you for your comments. I suppose I was hoping for another kind of "magic wand" that would make this project less time consuming. I've tried Tommy-O's suggestion which is working plus I'm mixing it up with Kraellin's suggestion. On some photos these spots are so numerous, it's hard to find a clean area to sample. I'm also using Polaroid D&S Filter. I'm trying to also preserve what little condition is remaining of these photos. I find the Polaroid Filter seems to ignore large sections of spots and to try and include them just smudges the whole photo. Even selectively, it still ignores the spots.

Curiously, sometimes when I paint these spots with a close sampled colour, and paint them out on a blank colour layer, they just go white. Am I doing something dopey here?
Here's an example I'm working on where the spots remain white.

[TommyO]

Hey Liz,
Not sure about the white... it may help to understand your layer stack more.

I tried a few steps using the threshold method. It came out pretty good and was pretty fast. It took more than one threshold mask, as the sky was pretty bright.

Here's the short story:
- copy background;
- on copy, run dust&scratches at 6 pixels (blurry but color blended nicely);
- don't work on this layer - we'll need it three times;
- copy it again (copy2);
- create a threshold adj. layer to capture spots in upper 1/3 of image.
- ctrl-click on RGB composite channel to load luminosity as selection;
- turn off the threshold layer;
- move copy2 to the top of the stack;
- on copy2, click to add a mask (which adds luminosity from above); this reveals the dust&scratch effect through the mask, helping the upper 1/3.
- Add a black gradient to hide any unwanted areas.

I did the same thing for the middle 1/3, then again for the lower 1/3, each mask revealing a d&s of 6 pixels for its third.

At the top I ran d&s once more at 2 pixels on a merged layer. You could refine this using other methods or filters. But, it was pretty fast, maybe 5 minutes.