cleaning up purple, blue and white spots

[nfotis]

Hello everybody,

This is my first post, I hope this doesn't violates too many aspect of etiquette in the forum :-)

I stumbled upon this thread:
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/pho...ld-slides.html while searching for a solution to my problem.

I got to restore for publication an old photo scanned from negative at 4000 DPI
(I guess, I am the photo clean-up guy, and I have no idea what kind of photo is the original one).

I use the GIMP in Windows XP (no Photoshop available, I am a hobbyist).

This photo got many different kinds of problems on it:
blue specks,
purple and white spots,
etc.,
and I was reduced to retouching by hand the whole photo - it took nearly a day of work, and I think there must be a better way.

Here I include a resized copy of the problematic photo, I hope this is big enough to get a taste of the problem
(the original JPEG file is nearly 4 MB).

http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/6...37small.th.jpg

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Tomorrow, I will upload a version of the retouching/restoring I did, to give an idea of where I tried to go with the photo.

In the meantime, I hope the experts here will be able to experiment and test some ideas.

Regards,
N.Fotis

[nfotis]

Hello again,

to give an idea of the result of my hand-made clean-up, I point to this image:

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/618...7csmall.th.jpg

Needless to say, I am not very happy with the result, especially in the sky at the left part of the image.

After I made a clone-stamp treatment, I used the Colors/Equalize and Colors/White Balance on separate layer copies of the original image, then mixed the results.

Unfortunately, Colors/Equalize yielded some pink(!) spots in the place where the emulsion seems to have been gone (off-white spots in the original photo), and I had to go through a second round of clone-stamping.

Then I selected the sky separately and passed it through a 'Denoise' script that used the Wavelet plug-in.

Hope this gives an idea of the treatment that such photos go through.

N.F.

[Mike Needham]

Hi nfotis and welcome to RetouchPro

It may help if you post a larger cropped version of the affected area, I think the forum allows upto 100k or you could use a service like mediafire to host it.

[0lBaldy]

nfotis, Welcome to RetouchPRO Hope you enjoy your stay here and make lots of friends. Poke around, ask questions, offer help, have fun!

I see a mighty small photo when clicking your links...

If you use Photoshop you can post fairly large pictures which are under 100k using the 'save for web' function in Photoshop as described here:
Size, Quality and/or Format your Attached Images.. (Click here)

How to attach Files/Images to your Posts or Threads:
(Click here)

If you want to post a larger resolution that is over 100K then you can host your image elsewhere and attach a link in the thread, but also please attach an under 100K version (so the thread remains useful in the future, regardless of external links).
Other Hosts if you do not have your own site:
ImageVenue.com (3Meg max, free) pixentral.com (2Meg max, free) photobucket.com (1 Meg max free, 5 Meg PRO) mediafire.com (100 Meg per file, free) post a link in the thread to the site that is hosting the larger image. (link to the highest resolution.. or the largest size you can upload)

[nfotis]

Darn, I thought I posted the large photo, I'll give the link to the Imageshack file directly:

Original photo:
http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/6...00037small.jpg

Manual retouch:
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/618...0037csmall.jpg

(it seems that the forum code created by Imageshack is not read correctly here)

N.F.

[Tony W]

Hi nfotis, I think you have done a very good job so far. I dont use Gimp so am unsure of tools you have available but you seem to make heavy use of the clone stamp. I had a bit of spare time so as an experiment I tried a different way to tackle the blue and purple spots.

Using a layer set to Color I sampled areas near the spot and merely painted over the offending colour to blend in. While this may have left small luminosity issues it offered a pretty quick fix and to paint over the whole image less than 30 minutes. Please ignore the sky as I ran out of time and this does need more work - in fact I think that I would even consider masking and lightning this area to keep focus on the engine

[nfotis]

Just to clarify:

The original photo is huge (approx. 4500*3000 pixels), so I didn't upload the full resolution version (I downscaled to 1600 pixels wide).

It seems that the film was scanned on a minilab (Fujifilm SP-3000), probably at a photo store.

I used the clone stamp extensively, as you noted, but that was a very crude (and slow) tool.

I suppose that I could use from GIMP the 'Colors/Decompose' and 'Channel Mixer', but these do not have the fine-tuning of the Photoshop tools.

Any other ideas? Do you need the full size photo, in order to play with it?

N.F.
PS. I have stumbled upon yet another photo with a more insidious problem, I *may* be able to resolve it.

[Tony W]

I doubt that the full size image would be of much help due to not using the same application and limited knowledge of the specific tools you use.

As to other ideas, I wonder if you can seperate the worst damaged areas and isolate these by mask and then use the clone or similar tool - attached highlighted the blue and magenta damage and copy of blue channel only?

[nfotis]

GIMP offers the 'Decompose' tool, for breaking up an image into different components:

http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/plug-in-...egistered.html

I suppose that you suggest an RGB decomposition, and retouching only the blue layer?

In general, I have concluded that there are multiple ways of achieving the same effect. I will try also with the 'Colour mode' layer proposed above.

The original discussion (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/pho...ld-slides.html ) , with the channel blends proposal intrigued me, but I wasn't able to reach a satisfactory result
(maybe the 'Channel Mixer' is not suitable for the task?)

Cheers,
N.F.

[Tony W]

One more thought on this and an attempt at a different way. This should work but you will need to fine tune it and the big assumption is that you can work in The Gimp in LAB and also are able to use Apply image or similar?

As the blue channel has the most damaged I attempted to repair it by the following method:

• Duplicated image (just in case) and converted duplicate to LAB
• Copied the a and b channels
• Apply image command and applied the a copy to the b channel Darken mode @40%
• Apply image again and applied the b copy to the a channel, lighten mode @50%
• Slight surface blur to a and b channels
• Converted back to RGB

While there is a small easily correctable shift in colour balance I believe the moves have helped to minimise some of the issues

[John Wheeler]

Hi N. Fotis

Thought I would through in another angle to get rid of those blue splotches. I am not sure that GIMP has all the functionality as I use in my approach yet I bet it could be done. I developed a technique that helps "phase" out the luminosity of undesired colors. My first use of this was actually to get rid of certain sensor based Moire patterns yet works quite well in other situations. Here is the link to that blog: http://jkwphoto.blogspot.com/2011/05...ove-moire.html

Once the luminosity of the bad color blotches are taken care of then there are many ways to blend back in the color you want. Tony mentioned a very good way which is just pointing in the color you want with either the brush set to Color Blend or the layer set to Color Blend.

I took a different approach on the images below which was to create a mask of the blue blotches and then slightly desaturate those areas. So this was done without brushing colors in where needed, just layers and layer masks. The mask was created by subtracting green channel from the blue channel and then doing a levels adjustment. This is just one of many approaches to get rid of the blue blotches once the luminosity is matched.

In the images below I did not bother with the sky since that was a different and easier issue to fix.

Your original image:
http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/y...Original-1.jpg

Luminosity of image after phasing out the color blotches per my blog:
http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/y...hased-away.jpg

Here was the desaturate Mask:
http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/y...turateMask.jpg

Here is the final image (sky masked back t original image):
http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/y...0Pro/Final.jpg

I bet there is a way to do the same things on GIMP yet I do not have a copy on my machine to try it out. Hope this helps

[nfotis]

Hello again,

I made some attempts, but it seems that it is not that simple to replicate these tricks in GIMP. And I am not very conversant in masks etc.

Because my brain is half-fried, I will make another attempt in the weekend to replicate these tricks (at worst, I have one version of the photo ready).

Now, I am struggling with a very nasty case, with tiny black spidery marks (I suspect these are from fungus again), I will review the forum for any ideas after I do some experimentation.

Cheers,
Nick the Greek

[nfotis]

Just for the record,

- GIMP has no adjustment layer (you can 'create a new from visible' layer, though, if that means anything)

- GIMP is inside an RGB machine, so working in other color systems is a problem. You can decompose to layers in various systems, e.g. in LAB you get the L, A, B layers
http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/plug-in-...egistered.html

- You can do various combinations of layers in GIMP using modes as 'multiply', 'divide', etc.:
http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-con...yer-modes.html

Cheers,
N.F.

[Tony W]

Nick I cannot offer much help on Gimp it is so long since I used it - now that you have mentioned it I remembered that it does not have adjustment layers (at least the version I tried).

I guess that decompose to layers and the opposite recompose should get you in and out of LAB - exactly how I am unsure

Gimp does have 21 layer modes including color so it should be possible to dup the image and set dup to color then paint over, if it is not possible to do with a blank layer