Color Photo that needs serious retouching

[retlaw]

My father wants me to retouch a picture of him and a bunch of his friends at a bicentenial celebration, the picture has some big cracks and even a hole near the top, I am going to try to do it but I've never really done anything like this before, I have it scanned at 450 pix/inch as a jped, its about 1.15mb, I dont know how high of quality it should be, I just want to see some of the results, the location is:

http://dh4_ranking.tripod.com/untouched_picture.jpg

copy and paste that into your browser


Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks


- Matt

[Edited on 15-1-03 by retlaw]

[Edited on 15-1-03 by retlaw]

[Stellor]

Post it here and you will get some, probably a lot, of action.

Sam

[retlaw]

Ok, I'm uploading it to a tripod account a have, might takeawhile with my 56k dial-up but the exact location will be

http://dh4_ranking.tripod.com/untouched_picture.jpg

to access it you'll probably have to copy and paste the address into your browser, tripod doesn't allow remote accessing

[Denny]

I'm sorry but I can't do it for you at this time. I would if I wasn't busy but i'll give you some tips. In photoshop 7, use the healing brush tool, hold on to alt while clicking on the space beside the ruined area. Once you've done that just click on the ruined area and it should smooth it out a lot. If you're using phtooshop 6, you may use the stamp/clone tool but you'll have to spend some more time making sure that the brush strokes aren't visible. Basically the healing and stamp/clone tool are the tools you want to use.

You can sharpen the image by setting the image mode to lab colours and in the greyscale channel, go filter> sharpen> unsharp mask.

You may also duplicate the layer and filter>others>emboss>10 on the above layer and set the layer's blending option to hard light. This will sharpen the iamge a lot but only the edges. Use the opacity slider to adjust the strength of it.

[Edited on 15-1-2003 by Denny]

[danielo]

hi retlaw.
restoring old pics is quite a laborious task. in fact i never finish my own jobs due to that. basically i would adjust levels/curves to get some good shadows/lights back, which may be lost as a result of sun light and time action over the photographic paper. you also have to balance the colour (image>adjust>color balance). in this case i think you should add some red and magenta, as your pic looks a bit green.
then i use to clean all the small imperfections whit the cloninc stamp, and then the big cracks.
the meat of this is when you want to clean a crack over a face, or an eye, etc...because you'll miss the lost information -you'll have to paint it again-
my advise: loots of patience + keep your work saved as you progress, maybe you'll need to come back if you get stuck
good luck

[Stellor]

http://www.jaconsulting1.com/stellor/0011.jpg (http://www.jaconsulting1.com/stellor/0011.jpg)

Sam

[danielo]

hi again,


the meat of this is when you want to clean a crack over a face, or an eye, etc...because you'll miss the lost information -you'll have to paint it again-

i was just talking about the man with the brown t-shirt. it really takes more time.

[Stellor]

Originally posted by danielo
hi again,

[quote][i]

i was just talking about the man with the brown t-shirt. it really takes more time.
I set a 2 hour time limit on this because I am a little busy and I think the man in the brown tee shirt would take at least 1 hour extra. After saying that, my bet is the man in the brown tee shirt is the DAD and is the most important part of the picture. :lol If that is the case just say so and I'll spend the extra hour.

Sam

[retlaw]

Well, I examined the origional photo some more and actually no infornation is missing, what happened is that this picture is just to the point it has cracks in it, none of the lines are bends, what I'm going to take a crack at, no pun intended, is to just move the upper section oof the picture down

[Elgreco]

Nice job Stellor.

Pete

[Stellor]

Thanks Pete.

Sam

[retlaw]

Thanks very much for that, my dad likes it very much, my dad is the on with his shirt off,I'm just going to take my time working through it, just going to take me awhile, but my dad is very happy with it, a local store wanted $30 for a restoration of it

[h20mobius]

This is one of my first shots at restoration, and I ran into the same problems as the previous fella....here is what i came up with

http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~cbaldwin/restore.jpg