I know I read about elegant solutions somewhere (here, the internet and/or Katrin E. book) but can't find it:
When having a photo with a grey haze from a little water or fading through time and when you can still see the details beneath the haze I know there are ways using copies of channels (RGB and/or LAB) , blendmodes and masks to tackle this problem in a elegant way like the different methods to do colourcorrections.
But ... I can't find it anymore so I'm back on the trial & error track which is of course more timeconsuming than probably neccesary and very frustrating. I have this feeling it's right in front of me and I just don't see it.
If anyone can point out the right track I'd be so gratefull.
Hi Atlantis
Depending on the amount of haze, what I've found as a good starting point is to duplicate the layer and set it to multiply in the blending modes. Sometimes that's all you need, and you can play with the opacity to find a good combination of depth and detail. I've several times done this 3 or 4 times with different opacities. A good example is my "beautiful bouquet" lady (in the gallery). The background was fine, but she was very blown out. I duped and multiplied the original until she looked good, copy-merged the duplicated layers, then masked the background to get it back to the original colors. When I was satisfied with the overall color, I copy-merged the layers again and then set a repairs layer above that. It's not always the solution, but sometimes it works miracles.
The stinker on which I'm working right now had a lot of detail missing on the left of the person in the photo. I found most of that detail in the blue channel, so I copied the channel, made it a layer and used a blending mode to combine the channel and the working layer. Of course I now have a b&w arm on a color photo (there was NOTHING in the rest of the channels), so I may be hollering for help to get the color back into it. But I cleaned up her face on the channel layer and was able to blend it to get great face detail and keep the color. I either used Overlay or Pin Light. It's interesting to play with the blending modes, because sometimes the ones you'd least expect to give you the best results bring out the detail beautifully.
I hope this helps a bit.
GK
Sometimes I, after the damage is repaired, will copy/paste the green channel on top fo the restore. Set blend mode to soft light; mask and build up with a soft low opacity brush where more density is needed.
Thanks girls, that helps a lot and saves a lot of unwanted cloning to repair the haze.
There are probably even more ways to solve the problem so feel free to post your own solution.
I'm also glad that I was heading the right direction. A pity though there is not really a similar trick as in the colourcorrecting other than maybe do the colourcorrecting first and the next step is to check all the separate channels plus blendmodes to see what info they reveal before starting the healing & cloning.
Sometimes I'm able to get a decent haze mask using calculations. Emphasis on the sometimes - every image has its own character.