Frame of Damage

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Hey there :-),

I just finished my latest one, which really had a "frame of damage" surrounding it ;-).
Because of that, I'm not 100% sure about the lower parts (especially underneath his arms), so maybe you could help me out once again :-)?

Before:
After:

Once again I started by separating the frequencies with my beloved Surface Blur (for a tutorial see the third video here: http://www.operationphotorescue.org/forum/index.php/topic,2687.0.html) and used a "Normal" layer in between the HIGH and LOW (-pass) to get rid of most of the damage. I also painted in some shadows around his arms to make it look less flat.
This already did most of the trick, but I realized, that if his arm was sitting on something, it'd probably cast a shadow. So I just selected the area in Quick Mask and added a curves adj. layer with a lowered midpoint.
Now I finished the restoration with the clone stamp on the HIGH layer. Modes used were "Lighten", "Darken" and of course "Normal".

This however did not leave me satisfied, so I added some levels adj. layers to lighten the whole image and improve its contrast.
Next I color corrected the image by selecting his shirt of being neutral gray.
There was still some odd magenta on his skin that I wanted to fix, so I used a Hue/Saturation adj. layer, selected the Reds, defined with the eyedroppers and shifted the hue 10 degrees to the right.
Last thing was lightening his face with curves. I pushed the mid tones a little higher, added red and subtracted blue to get the color right.

That's about it :-).
In between I used some supporting layers like solar curves, on which I planned to do a special tutorial for ya (I even did, but Camtasia simply didn't save the files... will give it another go soon).

Edit: To get the right size for his arm, I used the ruler tool and checked the size. I then used that to get the size for the other arm right :-).

[lurch]

Nice job, Jonas! Rebuilding the arms is well done. I might make the subject's left sleeve a little fuller. The only other pick I'd have at the moment would be the light halo around her head (yes, the portrait is of a lady).

[kiska]

Looks good. However, she has a blue cast. You could do a curves, mid gray clicked on her right armpit. That helps.

[Jonas.Wendorf]

lurch, of course you're right ::)
To fix her sleeve, I selected the outer part of it, copy-merged it to a new layer and used warp to make it a little fuller (that way I didn't have to be so careful about the edges ;-)).
Reducing the halo was done with a new layer on "Soft Light" mode and a dark brush.

kiska, that is much better!
Thanks for your suggestion :-).

So this is the updated version:

[Mhayes]

Jonas, she is looking great!

Margie

[lurch]

Hi Jonas,

As long as we're aiming for near-perfection here ;), a couple more observations.
1) Halo is not entirely gone, as attached markup shows.
2) There's a grungy brownish stain on the lady's blouse (which isn't there in the markup 'cause I took it out). My removal was a quickie, and you can probably do better. I just made a color range selection, jumped it to a new layer (color mode), filled it with a nearby sampled color (took a few tries to get a proper hue), then used contrast/brightness to lighten until it blended nicely.

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Hi lurch,

very nice, you've got great eyes :-).

I got rid of the remaining halos by further dodging and burning and a little saturation shifting (some ares were more prominent because of too much saturation).
To remove the brownish stain I shifted the hue a little and desaturated the blouse a tad.

Here's the new one:

[lurch]

Nice!

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Thank you all for your responses, they've really helped :-).

I'm going to upload it now ☺