• Welcome to Operation Photo Rescue's Online Community.
 

My First Restoration for OPR

Started by bgates87, April 02, 2009, 10:51:33 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

bgates87



I'm just finishing working on this one from Hannie's gallery, I did all of the restoration on the blue channel using a combination of the dust & scratches filter and the clone stamp tool. I then colorized it using several selective color adjustment layers. The before and after is above, shrunk down by 50%. I'm not sure if this is where I'm supposed to post this but I wanted to get some feedback before I called it done.

Now I've got a killer headache so I'm going to go to sleep. I'll probably refine some of the coloring tomorrow when I'm looking at it with fresh eyes and then see what feedback I've got here before I upload it. Thanks for looking!

glennab

#1
Hi BG87

First of all, welcome to OPR from Florida.

I see you're already aware of the miraculous blue channel when there's a lot of yellow-orange damage.

Your cleanup is awesome.

An observation is that I like the less saturated version of the blue channel in its original version, especially on the man's face where the glare is more subdued.  Your restoration looks just a bit dark and contrasty to me.

I'm hesitant to say much about your colorization, because it's something I haven't tried yet.  I played around with your restoration because I thought the colors were a bit too warm, but I wasn't able to tweak it to look better than yours, so you may be right on and my 357-year-old eyes may be playing tricks.  It happens.

It's obvious that you're experienced and knowledgable.  I'm glad you're with us.  I suspect you have a lot to share with the rest of us.

Cheers!

GK

Killer headache?  I get a lot of those.  Hate 'em.  I hope yours is gone in the morning.
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal. ~Albert Pine

(Photoshop CS5 /Mac Pro)

Mhayes

BG87, no wonder you have a headache after working on this one. Great job! I would lighten up the area around the blinds at the bottom and possible the wall. Really impressive that you got this far in such a short time.

Margie
"carpe diem"

Margie Hayes
OPR President
[email protected]

Hannie

BG, I was stunned when I saw how much you did in such a short time, amazing job!
I would love to hear if anyone found a way to improve the "bronze" look after using the blue channel.  (I'm still working on a project myself with the same problem.)

Still, I think your restore looks great!

:up:

Hannie
Hannie Scheltema
Distribution Coordinator
[email protected]

bgates87

Wow, thanks for the compliments guys. I'm feeling much better today. Well when I looked at the image for the first time today the first thing that stood out was definitely the flaring highlights on their faces and that kind of bronze look Hannie talked about. I was thinking about it and I think the reason the Blue channel is so great for getting rid of the yellow/orange stuff on these photographs is the same reason it also causes skin to look shiny.

Blue and Yellow are complimentary colors when you're dealing with the color of light (as opposed to blue and orange when dealing with pigment) and that's why the blue channel tends to negate the yellow/orange damage. However, most people's skin color also falls in this range so the Blue Channel also darkens it. It especially darkens the midtones, which leaves glaring highlights.

To counteract this I created a copy of the Green channel (usually better for capturing skin tones in grayscale) and put it on a layer above my restoration. I then set the blend mode to "Luminosity" to let my colors show through. After this I used a layer mask to let the Green Channel only affect the skin. Of course I had never restored the Green Channel so I had to remove some more cracks and scratches, but I think the end result is an improvement over using just the Blue Channel. I also took some of your other situations too like brightening up the wall and the bottom of the blinds (although I didn't brighten them up too much because I figured the should be darker at the bottom where they get all bunched up and let less light through). I also made some minor color adjustments to the whole image to cool the colors down some. Anyways here's my final result:



I'm still not completely satisfied with the way the colors turned out but I don't think I can do much better. I like to think I am good at coloring images and making them look natural (my profile image was black and white) but this one's got me stumped.

GP

BG,

I agree with you, you took this picture as far as you possibly could. You did restore this photo very nicely. I'm sure the family will be thrilled to get it back. You have to remember that this photo is a snapshot and not a portrait, taken in a studio by a professional photographer.
What counts in this case is the content of the photo, and not any artistic impression we might have.
Congratulations on you first restore, great job! :up:

Gerlinde
PS CS5, PSE9, XP, Windows 7 -64bit

Hannie

BG, your second version looks very good! 
I agree with Gerlinde, you have already given the owners back a photo that seemed lost.
Your first version, I tried a few color adjustments and it seemed to work better on your restore than on my own.



I did a basic levels adjustment in RGB and then I used this color correction method that Chris posted some time ago:
http://www.operationphotorescue.org/forum/index.php/topic,1412.msg14623.html#msg14623
used a 2% median blur and in selective color adjustments I picked the reds and placed the black slider to -45 to give a lighter skin tone.
That left me with some yellow stains so I lowered the yellow saturation to -73.

(mm, maybe now they are a little too pale... )

Hannie
Hannie Scheltema
Distribution Coordinator
[email protected]

lurch

Hi BG87, and welcome to OPR. Your obvious expertise with Photoshop will be well appreciated here. And, heaven forbid, you may end up as loopy as the rest of us - if you aren't already  ;)

I too now do most of my restoring on a gray-scale channel. I'll start with the one that has the most detail and use a curve on it to make it match the image's overall luminosity in key areas, like skin tones and strong colors - those can be funny-looking curves :^). I'll make the result into a luminosity layer and work on that to get the tonality right. Once the tones are good, the discolorations can be painted out on a color layer using colors sampled from nearby good areas.

As Margie has pointed out, we see a lot of photos with yellow-orange-red damage, and in those cases the blue channel is often the best. It seems the Louisiana/Mississippi mold likes the taste of one of the dye layers (cyan?) in color prints better than the others. Any channel is fair game for a lum-layer base, though. You'll find yourself 'channel surfing' a lot as time goes on.

You've done a great job in record time on your first restore. It's so good that I'm going to pick some very small nits. On my monitor (and to some extent by the numbers) your skin tones could use just a touch less cyan. There are, as you know, many ways to deal with this - I took a quick and dirty approach using color balance. Adjusted midtones to move skin tones just a tad toward red, and highlights and shadows to make the whitest part of the boy's shirt and the pen in the man's pocket neutral. If I could remember the settings I used, I'd tell you what they are, but . . . The other one - the shadows in the man's shirt seem a little noisy. Might be a color correction problem since Hannie's adjustment made them look somewhat smoother.

<C>

bgates87

Thanks for the feedback guys. I realize there are a lot of little things that can be improved on this image but I felt like there wasn't much more to do that would actually help restore the thoughts and memories the image invokes in its owners. As far as speed, I don't post my work publicly very often so I've never had any idea how fast I worked compared to other people, but I guess I work fast. All I can really say is that I've memorized a ton of shortcuts (I always work with one hand on the mouse and one hand above the control and alt keys) and if I find myself doing something over and over again I create an action to do it for me. I've got a few custom actions that I think really improve my workflow.

I've also got one little trick I use that helps speed up the removal of small cracks and scratches and some kinds of noise. I create a copy of the layer I'm working on and apply a "Dust & Scratches" filter to the entire layer. Then I add a layer mask to hide the filter and paint with white on the layer mask to apply the filter to only selective areas of the layer beneath it. For large images I create a few different layers using varying strengths of the filter to cover larger cracks. This won't work well for damage around people or across thin edges but for backgrounds and areas of large flat color it works great. You could use other filters like median or gaussian blur but I find dust & scratches is great about removing damage but leaving behind the texture that should be there.

lurch

I knew there was stuff we could learn from you.
<C>

Ausimax


Hi BG, and welcome aboard! Nice job on your first restore, what I find when recolouring a blue channel restoration is that it helps to lighten the image as much as practicable before colouring, helps the colours be more natural.

Lurch, I agree we can learn something from this lad, my problem is going to be remembering it!
My workflow consists mainly of staring at the screen trying to remember what I was going to do next. or what tool I was just about to use.


Max
Wisdom is having a well considered opinion .... and being smart enough to keep it to yourself!     MJS

"Life" is what happens while you are planning other things!

lurch

Max, wait til you get to be as old as I am! You know what they say - the older you get the more you believe in the hereafter. I'll walk into a room and ask myself "What on earth was I here after?"
<C>

Candice

 :funny: :funny: :funny: :funny: I like that!
Candice