Need help with stains/discolorization

[dipech]

Hi!

I'm having trouble with this pic and thought I'd see if anyone has any suggestions for fixing up the arm and the discolored top. I've already tried quick-masking the arm and then filling it in at various opacities, but that didn't quite do the trick.

Hope someone can help. It will be very much appreciated.

Diane

[dipech]

Re: discoloring, stains

This was the original. I'd really like to hear how others would handle the discoloring problems on the arm and dress.

Sleepless in Passaic,
Diane

[roger_ele]

Hi Diane,

I hope you are doing good. I gave just your issues a quick shot before going to bed. My skin color is close but not right yet ...

I think yours increased in saturation too much, try changing the blend mode of the color adjustment layers (levels, curves, whatever you are using) to color instead of normal.

I used a curves adjustment layer for the color adjustment, then again for just the non-glass area, and reversed the mask/selection on another curve layer to tweak the glass area. I then sampled the pink dress color and painted it on a empty layer set to color blend mode to color the dress.

On the arm, you have the shading information in the original next to the damage but you ran into trouble when you painted over the good area. I cloned into the damage from adjacent spots that looked to be the same brightness that I wanted. Where it went fuzzy I brought back the texture with the patch tool. If that shading info had not been there I would have used shading from the other arm ...

Hope this helps some,
Roger

[Leah]

This is just getting the discoloured area into step with the rest - obviously I haven't done anything about overall colour balance or done more than make a start on fixing the damage...

I used a masked Color Balance layer to get the discoloured bit of the arm and dress as close as possible to matching the other areas.

Then I created an empty layer, set to Color blend mode, and did some sampling from similar areas of skin and dress in the main picture that I then painted on at about 30% opacity. This tied the colours in better than the "as close as possible" I'd managed using the Color Balance layer.

I did this working from the original rather than your restored version as that made the masking easier

[KenB]

Diane, first off, this was a totaly enjoyable old photo to work on and I thankyou for letting me have a crack at it. What I did first was use the clone tool, in color mode, and sampled some good color areas and cloned over the miscolored areas. This got them pretty close but not close enough so I selected just the areas I needed to adjust and applied a selective color adjustment layer followed by a saturation adjustment. I think it worked very well.
The cracks were fixed using the usual methods, cloning and healing.


Ken


A side not... I added a little noise to even things out a tad and it took about 2 1/2 hours.

[dipech]

Re: discolored baby

Hi Roger, Leah and Ken!

Thank you all so much for your help on this one!!! There seem to be many tools I've never used before involved with this restoration: selective color adjustment layers, saturation adjustment layers, etc.

I am struggling to figure out all the steps and learn some of these new techniques. The clone tool in color mode is a great new discovery! I've been using the healing brush in replace mode for a while instead of using much of the cloning tool at all. I'll have to try out some of the other modes that may be useful.

WIth the color balance adjustment layer, I haven't been able to get anywhere at all. Is there a trick how to apply it?

Ken, can you explain in any more detail how you applied the selective color adjustment layer?

Is it important to apply curves, etc in an adjustment layer rather than without one?

Don't you have to always flatten the image afterwards to resume working on the full picture and if so, what's the advantage of the adjustment layer?

This is about as far as I got before seeing Ken's post. I got frustrated and resorted to using mostly the clone tool and then the dodge and burn tools in a lighter opacity for the shading on the arm.

It is so great having you guys around!
All the best,
Diane

[dipech]

Another discolored pic

This is another pic with a discolorization problem. What tool(s) would you recommend to best and most efficiently clean up the stains on this one? I'm sure I spent way more time than I should have on the restore I did.

[KenB]

Re: Re: discolored baby

Originally posted by dipech



Ken, can you explain in any more detail how you applied the selective color adjustment layer?

What I did Diane is... I selected the area I needed to fix the color in and took a 3 pixel average color sample and then took another sample from a good area of the color I wanted to apply to the bad area. These color samples will appear in your info palette, you can instantly see what colors you have to bump up or down. The next part, for me anyways, is just to kind of guess what sliders will achieve the effect you want...just move a slider and see if the colors in the info palette are moving towards what you to end up with. I'm sure someone probably has a more precise way to do this and if they post, we'll both learn something new

Hope this helps you.


Ken

[KenB]

Wedding party

Diane this one was a cakewalk


The only channel that showed the stain was the blue channel, so I replaced it.

Tutorial on how to do that here...

http://www.retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=23

From there it was just a little color correction and also I adjusted levels.

Ken

[Leah]

Diane, With the wedding photo I adopted a slightly different technique from Ken (since the damage was quite localised to a specific area of the image - if the whole blue channel had been bad I would have done it the same way).

What I did:

I - Initial assessment
1. Looked at the channels, noticed that the discoloration was only really visible on the Blue channel. Also, on the photo as posted it was only visible on the white dress. Decided that I could use the blue channel to select just the stained areas.

II - Selecting the stained areas
1. Made a duplicate of the image (DUP1), Channels tab -> Blue channel, Image -> Mode -> Grayscale (this makes greyscale image from currently selected channel).
2. Made a duplicate of DUP1 (DUP2).
3. On DUP1, added a Threshold adjustment layer set so that the dress but very little else was white. Then added a new blank normal layer and with black painted out the non-dress parts of the image that were still coming out white. Flattened DUP1.
4. On DUP2, added a Levels adjustment layer and tweaked the levels so that the dress (or at least the majority of it) was white but the stained areas of the dress were a dark gray. Flattened DUP2 and then Inverted the image so that the stains were light and the stain dark.
5. Back on the original image, chose Select -> Load Selection. Chose DUP1 as the Source Document and Gray as the Source Channel.
6. Still on the original image, chose Select -> Load Selection again. Chose DUP2 as the Source Document, Gray as the Source Channel, and Intersect with Selection as the Operation.
7. This gave a rough selection of the stained areas on the dress. Went into Quick Mask mode and using black (shows up as red) painted out any other areas that had become included in the selection.

N.B. This is how I did it - there will be lots of different ways. The point is that at this point you want to end up with a reasonably good (can be tweaked later) selection of just the stains.

8. Saved Selection as a new channel called Stains (just in case I needed it later).

III - Fixing the color stains
1. With the Stains selection active, added a Levels adjustment layer (this automatically adds a layer mask to the new layer the same as the current selectin). Looked at the R, G and B channels. From step I-1, I was expecting the Blue channel to be the one that needed fixing. Noticed that on the Red and Green channels the highlight slider was just slightly to the right of the right hand edge of the histogram and the midtone slider was even more slightly to the right of the left hand edge of the histogram. Adjusted the sliders on the Blue channel to be similar to this (looking at the image as I did so to check that the changes were blending in).
2. With the Levels layer mask selected, painted in white (at a low opacity, building up the effect) on one additional area that was slightly stained but that hadn't been properly picked up by the selection.