colour stains

[paulus]

Hi

I'm a newbie but I've been lurking for several months reading threads, tutorials and stuff.

I've stuck my big toe in the water and started doing restorations for OPR but I'm keen to also work on my own photos.

I'm stuck on the photo attached - originally it was very faded but I've semi corrected the fade but I can't make progress on the stain - I've read some of the threads but no luck.

I suspect its easy enough to do but when I try it looks worse - I want to avoid cloning were possible as I need to know how to sort stains - given the OPR photos coming my way!

Any help would be great
Cheers
Paul

[mistermonday]

Hello Paul and welcome to RetouchPro. I have two suggestions on the stain.
1. Copy and paste good sections of stair over the stained one (example shown with two such areas).
2. Dodge the stain. I did a quick bit of dodging as shown near the bottom. Effectively you brighten just those areas until the luminosity is the same as the good adjacent areas. You may need to use a small amount of cloning to do touch up.
I would convert the image to grayscale, restore it and at the end if you prefer you can tone it back to sepia.
OPR is a good cause. Good luck with your restoration.
Regards, Murray

[chillin]

You could try to clean it up, but it's time consuming.

[paulus]

Thanks for the tips tried both with limited success so I cracked and got the clone brush out together with curves and produced a decent image

- not perfect but good enough

Thanks for your help
I'm going to retry your methods over the weekend

Cheers
Paul

[TerryB]

Hi Paul:
Welcome to RetouchPRO.
Might want to consider selecting the stain, copy it to a new layer, set the new layer's blend mode to screen, drop that layer's opacity to ~45%. That'll get you pretty close, then you can clone/heal from there.

[Volvo]

How would one go making a patch out of a clean part of the steps, copy & past to the contaminated parts of steps then Cont T and enlarge or reduce in size to fit with mayby a tad of blending???...
Cheers