Kindercare

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Hey there :-).

I just got finished with my latest restore and thought I might share it with you to double check it ☺

First things first, here's the before:
and after:

This one was pretty straight forward, so don't expect anything to fancy in my work flow ;-)
I started by selecting the dark spot behind the red wearing boy's head and lightened it with curves.
Next  I used the healing brush and clone stamp to clean up the background. In some areas, the spot healing brush with Content Aware option came in pretty handy.

Most of the overall work was done with painting indeed.
I just sampled nearby colors and painted over the areas with defects on them (lowered opacity and soft brush). To get less monochrome colors, I used the color jitter in the brush settings.
Because I had also lost the wrinkles in the curtain, I selected the intact parts, used "Filter"-"Other"-"High pass" to extract them and overlayed it to the areas that looked too clean.
I also added in some noise over the painted areas to match the grain of the rest of the image.

Now I had to reconstruct some parts.
For this I used copy and paste always sampling areas I thought might work.
Curves and dodge & burn were used to get colors and tone right.

For fine tuning the image I used dodge & burn, shifted saturation and hue a little in specific areas and added saturation and contrast to the whole image.


Now it's your turn to tell me all those little things I might have missed :-)!

Edit: I saw some things on my own and corrected them.

[Johnboy]

You are looking good. I would suggest that you darken the curves slightly. The highlights on the faces look to be blown out a little compared to the original. It isn't going to take much of a change maybe a nudge or two.

I thought there was some damage in the hair of the boy in the front row holding the sign. After downloading both photos I changed my mind. The strong reflection off his head makes it look like damage. I think darkening will help that situation too.

Other than that it looks ready to go to me.

Johnboy

[Jonas.Wendorf]

Thank you for the suggestions Johnboy :-).

I updated ASAP and here's my new version:


Edit: If there are no more complaints, that means upload to me :-)
Thanks again Johnboy ☺