My first restoration...

[freddie]

I was over at my mom's the other day, and she found an old picture of me that was taken some time shortly after Noah came out of his ark. She told me that before she had this picture taken, I fell off the bed and damaged my lip that same day. She was disappointed, because she thought it was an otherwise nice picture.

Unfortunately, over the years it was heavily damaged and faded. Therefore, I thought I would give it a shot at restoring it. Here's my take at it. Anyone can also feel free to have a go at it.

First of all, I cropped it. Afterward, I used frequency separation and the healing brush to get rid of the scratches, fade marks, and discoloration. I also painted on the low frequency layer to help get rid of the discoloration on the red outfit that I'm wearing (I'm not too thrilled with the results). And finally, I did some color, saturation correction and sharpening.

Original: http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/8102/originalxf.jpg

Restored: http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3597/restoreb.jpg

[unimatrix001]

Re: My first restoration...

Hello freddie and welcome to RetouchPro. You did a very good job, the only things i thought were off was the red was too saturated and when you removed the noise you removed to much of the detail from the carpet you were sitting. I gave this a try.

1. Checked the channels and the blue channel was really bad used apply image and applied the red channel to the blue channel in normal mode.
2. Used the patch tool to repair the scratches and damage.
3. Selected the carpet and adjust the color just a bit using a selective color layer
4. Selected the face adjusted the color using a color balance layer.
5. Added a new layer and painted in the eyes to a blue color reduced opacity to 68 percent.

[freddie]

Re: My first restoration...

Hey... that looks great. Good job.

Yeah, I wasn't too happy with the results of the red, and I knew it looked off... just wasn't too sure what was off about it.

It didn't even occur to me to check the various channels and replace a bad channel with one in better shape. However, I will look into that technique and see if I can learn a thing or two. Thanks.

[unimatrix001]

Re: My first restoration...

Glad i could help. I did make when i did the apply image function. I should have chosen the green channel set to multiply. Then a levels adjustment (control L) on that channel and set the midtone arrow between 130 and 135. Sorry I did the first image very fast but had more time to work on it later to see what i could do with the color. It comes out pretty much the same but there are less selections to make to get the color better.

[chillin]

Re: My first restoration...

Very nice work freddie
Levels, selective levels, HSL, selective HSL, color replacement & healing brush.

[Gary]

Re: My first restoration...

I was over at my mom's the other day, and she found an old picture of me that was taken some time shortly after Noah came out of his ark. She told me that before she had this picture taken, I fell off the bed and damaged my lip that same day. She was disappointed, because she thought it was an otherwise nice picture.
Unfortunately, over the years it was heavily damaged and faded. Therefore, I thought I would give it a shot at restoring it. Here's my take at it. Anyone can also feel free to have a go at it.
First of all, I cropped it. Afterward, I used frequency separation and the healing brush to get rid of the scratches, fade marks, and discoloration. I also painted on the low frequency layer to help get rid of the discoloration on the red outfit that I'm wearing (I'm not too thrilled with the results). And finally, I did some color, saturation correction and sharpening.

Original: http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/8102/originalxf.jpg

Restored: http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/3597/restoreb.jpg

Nicely done freddie.
As already stated, after cropping, I used channel blending and curves for the reds then into LAB for the skin colors. To balance the wall and BG, I painted on a blank layer in color mode, used curves to fine-tune and the healing brush and clone tool for the flaws. I then extracted the boy, straightened the BG and filled in the missing sections with Content-Aware Scale in CS5. After merging down, I used some skin softening and selective sharpening.

Larger version here:
http://www.pbase.com/image/130755074

Cheers.

[freddie]

Re: My first restoration...

Wow... great job guys!