Can I borrow your eyes?

[Ausimax]

I have been hassling with this one for the last week, though I must admit the biggest hassle has been getting the time to work on it.

I started off by duping the layer and setting the blend mode to multiply and flattening to get some body into the image, then used selective colour to remove most of the red stain. Even then it was apparent that trying to restore it in colour was a lost cause.

The worst damage was in the red channel so I mixed the blue and green channels to make it B/W most of the damage was repaired by dodging and burning then healing and cloning, and finally recolouring.

I'm not too happy with the woman's eyes, they seem too big but when I make them smaller she doesn't look right, anyway have a look at it and give me your thought and suggestions on how it may be improved.

After a while you seem to reach a stage where nothing you do looks right anymore, and its time to call in some fresh eyes.








Max

[Hannie]

Hi Max,

You are so brave for picking this photo, what a mess!  What I usually do is zoom into the eyes as much as is helpful with both original and restoration next to each other.  Then on a new layer I try to copy what I see, looking back and forth very fast from one image to the other.
At that stage I don't  worry about detail too much, I only want the eyes to look slightly similar.  When that is done I try to refine it some more.
(I didn't change the eyes in the image below, it is just an example of what it looks like when you start)

Hope that 'll help you some!

Hannie

[kiska]

Here is a quickie that might help.

I activated the blue channel and selected it, on the original.
Activated all the channels and pasted/set blend mode to soft or overlay
Used the move tool to slide it over your restore

Then a new layer to paint the eye shape

[Tess (Tassie D)]

Kiska thats a great method of getting the info into the picture. I think we'll need to put all these into a pdf so they're easy to find for everyone.

[Ausimax]

Thanks Hannie, what I usually do is have the working copy over the original and dial the opacity of the working layer up and down to see if the features index.

Thanks Kiska, that helped make it more realistic, a bit more trimming and I think I will send them home.

Max