Mixed feelings

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Hey everybody :-),

just finished my latest restore and wanted to show you ☺

Before:
After:

I guess I should clarify, that the subject has more to do with the actual workflow than with the image itself ;-).

To begin with, I used the channel mixer to neutralize the image. In the red channel I put in 80% red and 20% blue, in the green channel 20% red, 80% green and in the blue channel 50% green and 40% blue. This was set to "Color" mode.
I used the channel mixer, because I found it to work best in this case and I was toying around a little anyhow ;-).
Next I used the healing brush and clone stamp to repair most of the damage (until then I left the area around the nose pretty much untouched). For the hair I used a pretty small clone stamp and just cloned from both sides always following the natural growth direction of the hair.
Now to get the lines around the mouth and the nose correct, I used CS5's new mixer brush and just painted them in. Afterwards I added a little texture back in using a combination of the "Filter"-"Other"-"High pass" and "Filter"-"Noise"-"Add noise".
Now I darkened the area on the right down corner a little because it seemed to bright. Quick Mask and curves were used for this.
So far the overall repair was done, but I was not completely happy, so I upped the saturation 30 points with a Hue/Saturation adj. layer in "Saturation" mode (prevents channel clipping), used a little dodge and burn to get rid of the remaining spots and a new Hue/Saturation adj. layer to fix the hues.
As I was still not 100% happy with the image, I used two gradient map adj. layers to fix the colors of the skin and hair (both were set to ~30% opacity).
Now as a very last step I used the "Modern Man from Mars Maneuver" for a little more color (to do this merge all visible layers to a new layer, convert into a Smart Object, go to "Image"-"Mode"-"LAB Color" and use "Image"-"Adjustments"-"Equalize" on the Lightness-, a- and b-channel. Now return to your original and lower the opacity to something like 20%). I also used a chromacity (saturation in relation to brightness) mask for this one (tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCo-nKpMSU), but it's just a little extra, nothing completely necessary ☺.

And now it's up to you again :-). Please tell me anything I missed and what to make better next time!

[G3User]

Jonas,

Looks like a really difficult image to correct the color. It will be wet tomorrow, I will try and work through your description and see how it goes. Have to say that the skin tone seems to be a bit yellow on my monitor.

Thanks for the effort

Athol

[glennab]

Hi Jonas

I think you may be making your color correction more difficult than it need be. I agree with Athol that your restoration has a definite yellow tint to it.

I took your original and color corrected it by just bringing the sliders in to the beginning of the histogram and did the same with the completed image.  I'm going to post them for you so that you can see how close you can get by just doing that.  I'm sure more tweaks would be helpful, but I think the first iteration looks pretty close except for the yellow discoloration in the center (I'd use the lasso to select that area, give it a large feather and then use selective to correct that portion. I did it rather down-and-dirty, so it's not perfect).

Original




Your restoration



Cheers,

GK

[Hannie]

Hi Jonas,

Great Your repairs look great!  I can see the same yellowish tone on my monitor that Athol sees. 
Levels adjustment took most of that away.  Then a selective color adjustment layer adjustment in the whites (about 35% less cyan, magenta and yellow) can help as well.

This method left a halo of yellow around the boy's head in the background that was easily corrected with color layer and samples from the good colors in the background. 

Hannie

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Great additions everyone :-).

Color seems to be the point I struggle with the most somehow. I used the suggested levels method and also a new layer in "Color" mode, because I noticed that some areas became blotchy and suddenly appeared in vivid magenta/green.



Glenna, as I said, I was just playing around a little, but you're right of course :-).
Seems like the simple methods are sometimes really the best!

Edit: Seems like I've got everybody happy again :-)
Thanks again, I'll upload now!