Digital Stain Remover PDF

[Stephen M]

It has taken me a while to find a URL for this PDF, I have had the PDF for years but did not have an address for others to download it (my server could not host the file due to restricted space).

Here is the link, it is a rather creative correction method for Photoshop 3 or 4 which works for later versions too, from the famous Russell Brown:

http://www.bluest.com/revisions/prices/rbstains.pdf

http://www.bluest.com/revisions/prices/

Regards,

Stephen Marsh.

[DJ Dubovsky]

Hey that's a keeper. Thanks Stephen.
DJ

[T Paul]

I added that one to my photo retouching files. Thanks Stephen !

-T

[Hydia]

Thanks for the tip. Just printed out the page

[Sharon]

I gave this tutorial a try in hopes that I would be able to restore my son’s baby picture. Although the tutorial worked great for the example, it didn’t work on my photo. Is there a way to eliminate the large yellow stain that covers part of his chin and chest without cloning?

I attached a copy of the problem photo.

Thanks.
Sharon

[Doug Nelson]

I'd approach this in one of several ways:

I'd start by splitting the color channels, picking one (in this one I like the red), make a careful selection from one of the stained stripes, feather 3 pixels, move the selection to a non-stained area, copy, paste, then move the pasted area into place and apply either 'darken' or 'lighten' mode ('darken', if you use the red layer).

Or you can duplicate part of a good area, paste, move the layer under the stained layer but placed under the stain, then use a layer mask on the stained layer to remove the stain and show the good area.

There are even more ways. Let me know if one of these don't work out.

[Sharon]

Doug

Thanks for the information. I tried both of your procedures. But they didn’t work for me.

I would like to try out your other methods.

Thanks.
Sharon

[Doug Nelson]

Ok, this is very rough, and soft because I was working on a low-rez jpg, but here's a solution that will work (actually, it's just a variation on the same solutions, and one of my most basic techniques).

For speed I simply used 'auto color', which gave a decent black & white except for the stain. Then I went in with the lasso tool (3px feather) and selected areas of one tone within the stain. I started with a stained white stripe area, selected it, moved the selection to a non-stained white stripe where the selection would fit, copied, pasted to new layer, and moved over the original selection area. I repeated this for various areas, including the triangle of shirt under his chin.

For some of these, I turned down the opacity a bit, ignoring the stain coloration and only paying attention to the light/dark values.

That worked for everything but his chin. For that things got a little trickier. I desaturated to get rid of the stain coloration (normally I don't just use desaturate, but after the use of auto-color there was no difference).

I used the same lasso setting, but where to get a good area to copy from? I ended up flipping the selection area and rotating slightly, and using the area at the bottom of his right cheek. Copy, paste to new layer, flip horizontal, rotate a bit, and it fit right in. I lowered the opacity a bit to let some of the chin detail show through.

Not my finest restoration, and you're still going to need to use the clone tool for some cleanup (plus I didn't bother with the bg at all). But this will at least work for you.

[Hydia]

Sharon I played around with the photo last night and I tried the dodge tool at a low setting to get rid of the hard dark edge around the stain to lighten. It helped and then I played around with a selective adj layer to blend tone along with a curves adj.

Just thought this might help and give you some other options to try.

[Sharon]

Doug thanks so much for the detailed description and restored example.

Hydia thanks for your technique.

I'll give them both a try as soon as we get back from the Zoo.

Sharon