Tips
Email your retouching and restoration tips and I'll post them here to show the world what a smartie you really are.
Grain Brushes
I have done restorations the last several months I was never satisfied with the effects the photoshop brushes gave me, the feathered brushes are too soft and blurry but the hard brushes leave edges. Well, finally the answer came to me...'grain brushes.' The problem with 'regular' brushes is that they smooth over the inherent grain in the photograph, so if you paint with grain you get a better look. Here's the technique for making your grain brushes: make a new layer over your restoration image, then make a selection with a marquee tool (make the selection pretty large, you'll see why). Once the selection is made fill it with white, then go to the Filter menu...to Noise...and then to Add Noise. In the Add Noise dialog box click on Monochromatic and set the amount of noise with the slider. Make as little or as much as your image's grain calls for, the idea here is that your brush will have the density of the noise you put in the box. Now to make the actual brush(es) simple make selections of whatever size and shape you need right inside the noisy area of the layer. Once you have a selection for a new brush simply go to the little menu in the side of your brushes palette and select Define Brush. There you have it, a bit long but I believe it will serve well. I never do a restoration without grain brushes anymore! One more hint: you will find that you need to make new grain brushes frequently because the pixel dimensions of your restoration scans will vary quite a bit and your brushes from last time may seem too big or small for current works. - Lee Clifton
Eliminating Skin Blemishes
One technique is to use Gaussian blur on the entire image at just enough radius to make the blemish disappear. Take a snapshot, then undo the blur. Point your history brush at the snapshot, and with a small, soft brush, paint out the blemishes. Use cautiously, and gently, otherwise you'll end up with little "perfect" spots surrounded by natural skin texture.
You can also experiment with blend modes, perhaps even leaving the actual blemishes but painting them the color of the surrounding skin. This more 'naturalistic' approach may or may not please your clients. - Doug
Deleting Photoshop preferences
Sometimes Photoshop will start exhibiting weirdness. Palettes may disappear, tools may start performing contrary to our wishes (or not at all). Options may seemingly change of their own volition. These and many other symptoms are commonly caused by the preferences file becoming corrupt. Anytime you suspect that things in PS aren't as they should be, the first thing to try is deleting your preferences file. When you do this PS will automatically create a new file with the factory defaults. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the Alt, Ctrl, and Shift keys (Mac Command, Option, Shift) immediately after starting Photoshop. A dialog box will appear asking if you wish to delete the preferences file. Alternatively, you can simply search your hard drive for a *.psp file and delete it. - Doug
Clone tracks
The problem with 'smudging' with the clone tool is caused by cloning from an area just set down by the clone tool. This causes a repeating pattern. It can be very obvious, as in a noticable feature or flaw repeating, or more subtle, as in the grain looking 'unnatural' since it doesn't match and is made more obvious by repetition.
The most basic answer is:
if the area is big enough where clone/stamp tool repetition might be a problem, don't use it. Use the lasso tool to circle the area with a slight feather then move to a similar area, copy, paste to a new layer, and move it into place.
But, some times that's just impractical due to the amount of work involved.
In that case there are several steps that can be taken:
- turn down the opacity and make several 'trips'
- don't drag the pointer, use several discrete clicks
- turn off the 'aligned' feature, pick an area far away that still has what you need and use separate clicks instead of dragging
- use blend modes (careful, this can make it worse)
- with 'aligned' on, keep one finger on the alt-key and pick a new source for every single click (again, don't drag)
- use the correct brush size, the smallest that will cover, and with soft edges. Use the [] keys to scale up and down, and make sure you have 'actual brush size' selected in preferences
- vary techniques, vary direction, vary everything so patterns can't form
But mostly, avoid using it if you possibly can. Nothing announces an amateur restoration faster than clone tracks. - Doug
Straighten out a bad scan
Straightening out a bad scan doesn't have to be hard! Just use the crop tool instead of rotate. Line up all of the edges of the photo and crop it (you don't have to crop anything from the photo to do this)! This has saved me hours of time! - submitted by Markus Schneider
Missing Pieces
Sometimes the only way to repair a photo that has missing pieces, is to "borrow" from another photograph. I keep a folder of every good photo I come across, to use for "parts". Many of the older photos have people in similar poses, and they can come in handy if you need to replace something such as hands, feet, ears, etc. - submitted by Vikki Hansen
Ever ran across a Black and White photograph that had lost a bit of it's detail? If so, try this simple, yet effective, trick.
Simply make a new layers of the entire image using the Multiply setting. You will slowly start to see details come out that the naked eye cannot see. If the Layer, or Layers, are too dark or detailed, well, simply adjust their opacity. - submitted by Kenneth S. Coxie
Dust & scratches with the history brush:
Do an overall Dust & scratches on the image, carefully setting the tolerance value so film grain will still show through. Then go one step back in history, mark the Dust&Scratches step in the history palette, and paint with the History Brush in Lighten or Darken mode to remove dust and scratches. - submitted by Mathias
Dodging and burning can be problematic at best. One alternative method I use occasionally is to create a new layer, set mode to 'multiply' and turn the opacity WAY down, then paint with black and/or white (or gray). I feel it gives me more control, plus it also seems to be more tolerant of errors. And you can always turn the layer off and on to compare, and you can delete it totally if you really screw it up. - Doug
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Any layer mask can be a gradient...just make a layer mask (not the same as regular mask) and gradient (or paint) away (you might want to make a copy of the layer first, then layer mask, then use multiply mode or one of the other modes to darken or lighten) - Doug
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Colorization is always tricky, and never moreso than when dealing with faces. We have a natural reaction to faces with anything wrong with them, so a colorization (or any restoration) that might be fine for a car or a house would never fly at the same level if applied to a face. - Doug
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When colorizing, I start by making masks. Tons of masks. I think I counted over a dozen on the colorized WWII soldier shot I use on the main page of photorehab.com
After I've made my masks I'll start colorizing. Each mask is saved as a selection, and these selections can be combined and subtracted from each other as well as inversed to more finely hone the area. If I spend more than a couple of minutes on a new selection area (same thing as mask, only from a different direction) I'll save it in case I need it later.
My current favorite colorizing technique is to work on a new layer, using a selection based on the aforementioned masks. I'll then use the pen or fill tool to lay down one color (each new color uses a new layer). The color will invariably look really weird, but if you select the 'color' blend mode and then turn down the opacity you'll see a remarkably real coloration appear. - Doug
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If making a selection takes more than a minute, SAVE IT! - Doug
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Study good color portraits of people. You'll see that faces have many different colors. I'll normally make the entire face flesh colored (of course since I'm using my selections the eyes, lips, jewelry, etc. are unaffected) then add some reddish (usually) highlights to the cheeks, forehead, and ears (this is where the studying comes in). After I'm done with that I'll move onto the other masked areas, since the face takes the longest. - Doug
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Sharpening an image depends entirely on the image. Some take it well, others don't. Again, trial and error is the best teacher here. Try these experiments to see if anything makes sense for you: duplicate the image layer, then apply a filter (try 'gaussian blur', others you might try are 'median', 'high pass', and any others that strike your fancy, not all at once, but on different experiments). Use the filter far too strongly, so that it totally ruins the image, then select the 'multiply' blend mode and start turning down the opacity. Other blend modes work better with different images, so try them all (I use 'soft light' and 'hard light' a lot).
You can also simply apply the 'unsharp mask' filter to the new layer and then follow the same steps. All of these can be further refined by using the selections I mentioned earlier to choose what will become this new layer. - Doug
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When you don't know for sure, try everything - Doug
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If you're into books, the Carol Braverman book on photo retouching is an excellent source for masking techniques, but the main thing is practice using every conceivable tool until you get a technique you're comfortable with. The Photoshop groups (and here) on Usenet and the Adobe Photoshop forums are also good sources for different techniques. - Doug
