Your single most dreaded retouch

[alceria]

Restoring a face is definately a pain if you don't have much image data to work with, but my current "oh god no" tyep of order is heavy heavy staining where there is no good place to clone from.

This restoration took me *forever*:

http://www.alceria.net/restoration/s...nal%20copy.jpg

The man's arms and chest and the baby's face gave me the worst trouble. I ended up picking up sections of the stain (because the stain varied in color) with the magic wand, and then would apply a hue/saturation correction to get it to something resembling skin tone. I get each part to match as much as possible and then would use the rubber stamp and healing brush to even things out. There was so much staining and cracking of the image that it couldn't be fixed by cloning alone. Anyone have any other ideas on a good way to approach a problem like this? I ended up with a decent picture at the end of it but it took entirely way too much time and the image lost a bit of it's sharpness. I'm hoping to find a better way to do this in the future. I already have another order that resembles this one entirely too much!

[denschneider]

EYES!!!!! I enjoy just about every repair/retouch that i've tried except repairing someones eye . just never been able to get them right

[Vikki]

Alceria,
What a great picture!
I did a little work on it (no time to finish).
I picked up the skin color from the chest, and painted it on a duplicate layer. I blurred it, and added some grain. I took a snapshot, and then painted with the history brush.
Vikki