Need some eyes and feedback.

[Pelican]

I know that I just need to keep working this cuz its working so far, but I have grass stains on my rear from flying by the seat of my pants.

Heres what I know:

The BG along the top is gone and its so destroyed that I can't just blur it out. I'm just trying to build a little in from whats already there so I can blur that.

The little girls face is flat as a pancake. I'm still working that. I haven't even touched the damage to her mouth, I've just tried to pull the shape out.

I've plugged some chunks of skin tone into the little boys face so I have something to work with.

It needs a ton of shading in the final steps



Here is the starting photo.


And heres where I am. I know its a little bright but anything less right now has blue, yellow and pink splotches everywhere. I'll fix that in the final steps.


I copied the blue channel and adjusted the levels to a really bright gamma. Presto! I had faces! Then I sent that to Calculations and blended it with the red channel and that helped a little more. But that just gave the a pic to work from. I still have to paint these in by hand.


I guess what I need to know is, am I on the right track? I'm selecting the layer to work on and then staying in the channels palette bouncing from rgb to my new channel. I hold my thumb to the screen to make sure I have hair lines, jaws and everything else in the right place.

Need some input. Thanks! :)

[glennab]

Curtis, my friend, you love pain, don't you?  What a mess you chose!

You can copy that blue channel (or the combined one) from the channels pallette and make it a layer.  Go to the channel, select only that channel, select all; create a new layer, and paste that channel's content into the layer.  I also discovered that if you switch to CMYK, the yellow channel shows the other side of the little boy's face.  Copy that as a layer also. 

Max is the expert on using these layers with your original to paint the color back in, so I'm hoping he'll jump in.  I've had some success with a face, but not with all this detail.

The first thing I'd do is mask the unusable areas of the channel layers, and once all the decent detail is visible, combine those layers to get your base.  That'll give you the faces.  Thankfully the wagon has good detail, and the background can be cloned and healed until you have your grass and path back.

Give it a shot - maybe in the meantime Master Max will jump in with more color help.

Cheers and good luck!

Glenna

[schen]

Kurt wrote a nice tutorial a while ago.  I tried it but the problem I had that I suspect you will run into too is that the blue channel is too grainy to be used straight out of the color channels.

http://www.operationphotorescue.org/forum/index.php/topic,434.msg3712.html#msg3712

[Pelican]

Yeah Glenna, pain is good.  ;D

Wow! That yellow layer really does say a lot, doesn't it. It pulled all the purple and blue splotches out. The boy's face is a little different than I thought and I can see now that mom's hair goes behind her shoulder.

Oh, and thanks for the tip on getting a channel into the layers palette. Some of this stuff is new to me. I've been chopping for years but mostly just fun photomanip like in my avatar. Never used channels before.  :P

[Ausimax]

Hi Curtis,

I am coming late to this discussion, but I see Glenna hes been dobbing me in, so I had better defend my honour. ;D

The usual method of using channels is to use the channel with the least damage or to blend the best channels together in Channel Mixer as a monochrome layer, then repair the damage on that layer then place a copy of the coloured image above it and set the blending mode to colour, that brings the colour back into the image.   You then merge the two layers and repair the remainder of the damage.

On this particular Image, you have got most of it under control so I would tend to only work on the faces on the Gray layer, repair then as best you can ( from memory I think this is a 4x6 image, if so work to getting it to look as good as you can at that size - keep checking how what you are doing looks at print size, it is easy working at 100% resolution to overwork the image and loose subtle detail, much of what you see in a photo that size is illusion rather than fine detail) then select the faces and hair of the people and paste them as separate layers above your colour image (save your selections) and copy the coloured faces above the gray faces and set the blending mode to "colour"

For the little boy there is no useful colour info in the original, so I would create a new layer, set the blending mode to colour, select a good face colour from one of the other faces and paint the colour in on the new layer- you may have to add several new layers and keep painting with different colours to get it looking good, and you can vary the opacity of the various layers to balance the result.

Then merge all the layers and do the final cleanup and blending.

Hope you can make some sense of all this drivel, Curtis, I'm not sure I can, and that it is of some help.

Max

[cmpentecost]

Hi Curtis,

I didn't have a clue about channels until I joined OPR long ago, and took on a challenge of a photo with a huge yellow splot across the boy's face (this photo is actually in the before and after gallery now). Once you get the hang of how to work with channels, it opens up a whole new way to restore photos.  However, I have to rely on all of the above guru's at this point, as I'm not able to spend the time I'd like doing the restorations, and am usually totally lost in their suggestions and recommendations.  Good luck with the photo.  You've got an awesome start on it!

Christine

[Pelican]

OMGoodness!




Thank you Max, that all made perfect sense. I need to make a new channel layer to reflect the work I've done so far but I see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

Thanks Christine. I had no idea what they did. This is so cool.  :up:

[GP]

Pelican, this is amazing! :up:

Good luck with the rest of the restoration.

Gerlinde

[Pelican]

Okay, I'm back with this one. Its been a bit too long and should be done.

I need a few suggestions though. This has been a bear to work on. Seems that everything I do gets it a little closer but there doesn't seem to be a real solution. I still have some work to do on the faces of mom and the little girl and those can be smoothed out pretty easily once I can start merging some layers. Problem is, I can't do that till I have the boy's face fixed a little better. His nose and eyes keep trying to come out but they just never quite make it into the clear.

Here is a crop at about full size. This picture only prints at 3x5 so I'm getting close.

Anything you can think of to help would be great!!

Curtis

[Mhayes]

Curtis, I'm jumping in this kind of late, but here goes. Wow! You really had a mess to work with and it is great how detail you were able to pull out. With this last one, I think it is really hard to work with it in color. I did the Channel Mixer and changed it to black/white. I mainly wanted to work on the shading and also work on getting the eye for the woman and working on the little boy's face. To me the color was too confusing to do this. I also thing that the color has gone to an orange cast.



And then I colorized the black/white and this is what I came up with.  It still needs a lot of tweaking.

[Mhayes]

Curtis,

One more thing that I would have liked, would have been for you not to crop this picture so much. I think having the full cart would have been nice. As I look at what I have done to their faces, I realize that they are too fuzzy and out of focus.

Margie

[Pelican]

Thanks Marge, that gives me a different perspective and some ideas. I should say though, I'm sorry I wasn't clear. The crop was just for a full size detail here. The picture is still its original size.

[OPRAng]

Nothing says that you can't just stick with B&W if that is what is working. Especially if that is where the info lies. OPR focuses on restoring the memory not the exact image. If you can't get the color to be just right. Sending a B& W back is a nice solution.

[Pelican]

This is looking better but the little boy's face is still a little flat. Here's the whole pic and a zoom.

I tried the B&W and really had no better luck with it.

[mschonher]

Hi Curtis,

I've been watching you struggle with this photo for some time now and I'm frustrated for you. What you have done so far is amazing.  You've pulled faces out of nowhere, you're amazing. I downloaded this last night and played around with the faces only.  I could not get the little boy at all, as you can see he looks strange and you did a great job on the little girl but I played anyway. I just had a pik about the mom's face.  I took away some of the detail and changed the angle of her eyes. I love your background and I think the colors are right on. Oh, I also gave the little girl a neck and put her hair behind her brother's arm. I know whatever you do in the end will be much better than what I've done.  Mainly I had trouble with the ladies eyes. She has her head tilted at a difficult angle with her chin jugging out a bit. I can't wait to see it when it's done.  And one more thing the golf photo is sooooooooo wonderful.

Mary