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OPR Workshops => Moderate => Topic started by: Jo Ann Snover on November 29, 2016, 04:00:23 AM

Title: Getting rid of texture
Post by: Jo Ann Snover on November 29, 2016, 04:00:23 AM
My latest restore was on this lovely image, and in getting rid of the texture, I used a combination of techniques that might come in handy for others at some point, so I thought I'd share.

Original and finished images:

(http://www.digitalbristles.com/temp/RootV_25_08_5x7-orig-sm.jpg)  (http://www.digitalbristles.com/temp/RootV_25_08_5x7-edited-sm.jpg)

An example of the texture at full size:

(http://www.digitalbristles.com/temp/RootV_25_08_5x7-texture.jpg)

I had hoped to be able to use a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) filter to fix the texture, but it didn't take care of enough of it, plus I was getting some streaks across the face and other areas as I tried to get more of the texture removed. I used ImageJ (https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/download.html) for the Mac to do the FFT and reverse.

I thought I might get somewhere with frequency separation - so that I could edit the texture on the detail layer while keeping the color intact. For anyone not familiar with this technique, Jonas had posted a tutorial and there's a good article here (https://fstoppers.com/post-production/ultimate-guide-frequency-separation-technique-8699) as well.

That was clearly going to be a very manual process, so after a bit of thinking I decided to try running the median filter on the detail layer of the frequency separation to smooth out the texture and that was really helpful. I put those layers in a group and masked them so as to apply only to the areas with texture (it blurs things a bit).

Afterwards I dug out an old scan I had of an image of me (many decades ago!!) that was printed on that bobbly photo paper. As that had texture uniformly over it, I thought I'd experiment with using the ImageJ FFT as well as frequency separation with the median filter on the detail layer to see if I could get good results either with Photoshop alone, or with a combination of ImageJ and Photoshop.

Here's a set of crops from that image to illustrate (click for larger):

(http://www.digitalbristles.com/temp/Texture-compare-tn.jpg) (http://www.digitalbristles.com/temp/Texture-compare.jpg)

You can see that the FFT made the texture less, but didn't get rid of it. When I took that result into Photoshop and used frequency separation, I was able to use a lower radius on the median filter than on the other example (where I skipped using ImageJ's FFT). I've also included the detail layer with and without the median filter
Title: Re: Getting rid of texture
Post by: Hannie on November 29, 2016, 05:58:27 AM
Hi Jo Ann,

Beautiful result!  Thanks so much for your post, it will be very useful for all those images where FFT alone just doesn't do the trick.

:up:

Hannie
Title: Re: Getting rid of texture
Post by: Shadow on November 29, 2016, 11:42:38 AM
You sure do nice work Jo Ann! Thank you for the texture tip ... am sure I will be putting it to good use.
Title: Re: Getting rid of texture
Post by: Mhayes on November 29, 2016, 12:10:35 PM
Jo Ann, thanks for the great tutorial and the pictures to follow. I am book-marking so as to not lose track of it. Great picture of you when you were younger.

Margie
Title: Re: Getting rid of texture
Post by: Lynnya on November 29, 2016, 12:52:03 PM
Thanks Jo Ann, great tutorial.. I'm about to try it out  :up: