First try on restore

[i-Dear]

Hi All,

My brother sent me this old picture from 1984 and I decided to restore it. I've got some experience with photoshop and mainly for making product photo on eBay.

I was searching how to restore photos and found this site. I've followed the tutorial to fix this old picture.

Here is what I've done.

1. Cropped the image
2. use clone stamp to fix the eye for the kids at the top
3. Level RGB
4. use healing brush to fix the dust and scratch
5. At this point, the color still not right to me so I use auto level.

So thats what I've got. The color is still a bit off for me but I can't tell why. It would be great if anyone can point me to the right direction.

Here is the link to the image

http://oi60.tinypic.com/14mx2qx.jpg

Regards

Alpha

[lurch]

Re: First try on restore

It's too saturated and too contrasty

[tinyhappypixels]

Re: First try on restore

Hi, it looks great what you have done so far, well done!

Doing an Auto Levels can be a good start, what it tends to do is choose what it thinks is the blackest and whitest point in an image and sets that as the black and white point, which gives the contrast. It might look like it does a good job on the colour as well, but often there is still colour left in the blacks and the whites.

I think this is what has happened in your picture as I can still see some blue in your whites, and a touch too much red in your blacks.

A good tool you might want to play with is the 'Selective Color'. In the 'Blacks' tab reduce the reds by sliding the reds towards cyan, in the 'Whites' tab take the Yellow towards the blue.

You may also see that you can play with other channels to help neutralise the colours. For example, it could be nice to add a touch of red into your 'Yellows'.

Have a play, colour is a tricky thing to get right!

But you're on the right path :-)

Good luck!


__________________________
http://www.tinyhappypixels.com

This might take some tweaking to get a more natural look

[roso]

Re: First try on restore

I think you did a great job!!

[ThePhotoFixerUK]

Re: First try on restore

Good work. Especially for a first try. You could also try and bring some detail back into the whites by using curves(ctrl + m) in photoshop by placing two pins in the RGB channel.

[0lBaldy]

Re: First try on restore

i-Dear, Welcome to RetouchPRO
Hope you enjoy your stay here and make lots of friends.
Poke around, have fun!
Your off to a good start but it seems that there is more work that could be done... experiment with different adjustment layers till you get what you want in specific places then mask out the rest and go on to a new area to adjust...

[ThePhotoFixerUK]

Re: First try on restore

i-Dear, Welcome to RetouchPRO
Hope you enjoy your stay here and make lots of friends.
Poke around, have fun!
Your off to a good start but it seems that there is more work that could be done... experiment with different adjustment layers till you get what you want in specific places then mask out the rest and go on to a new area to adjust...

Nice job one bringing the detail back in.

[i-Dear]

Re: First try on restore

Thank you lurch, tinyhappypixels, ThePhotoFixerUK and 0lBaldy for pointing me to the right direction.

0lBaldy, You did such an amazing job on the photo. I will spend a lot of time to try to achieve that. Thank you very much.

[zorb]

Re: First try on restore

very nice work