Boy's portrait

[corpusdei]

Rev pa1.  This one's (initially) coming along fairly nicely.

Original:


Went through a levels correction with a threshold layer and found the white, black, and grey points.  Because there isn't a lot of background detail in this one, it seemed like a good chance to finally try damage correction using a frequency separation method (separating color and detail into separate layers).  Went through erasing and blurring some of the damage on the detail layer.  I can certainly see the usefulness of a frequency separation, but I noticed that his skin looked very airbrushed afterwards.  I jury rigged some skin texture (50% grey layer, liner light, add noise and emboss), but I'm not completely satisfied, so that might take some additional correction.

WIP:


Notes:
- It may be worth reducing the size of the skin texture layer to make the texture a shade less obvious. 
- There's some dust and scratch items that should be fairly easily removed with either the patch or healing brush.
- The background smudges should be removable by either replacing the background with a slight gradient or cloning the damage spots out. 
- The eye on the left will probably be replaceable by duplicating the eye on the right and distorting it slightly to give it the right perspective.
- The ear ... not so much.  That 's probably going to need to be manually recreated.
- Need to even out the skintones on the cheek on the left - tried to do some skintone painting on the color layer, but it ended up a bit blotchy.  Blending them into a more cheakbone-y shade should work better.
- The jawline will probably be a lot of color and detail work, with some shadows  for perspective.
- The shirt doesn't seem to show a lot of texture in the undamaged portions of the original, but it'll still be more than a quick C&P job.
- The soundtrack for this restore is turning into a lot of 16 Horsepower and Saltillo, a break from my usual Oakenfold and Front Line Assembly. 
16 Horsepower - Straw Foot - http://bit.ly/17kC5q
Saltillo - A Necessary End - http://bit.ly/bFugD7

[corpusdei]

Some small spot removal, plus copied the eye on the right, flipped, warped a little and blended into the left side.  Removed one of the white flash spots in the iris, but that's not looking right, so I'll likely re-add and just reposition so it doesn't look quite as shopped.



Good enough for government work and enough progress to call it for the evening.  It's martini time.

[schen]

You certainly picked an easy one to work on!

When you mirror the eye, the left eye is looking to the right and the right eye is looking the left.  I have maintained the outline of his right eye and copied the pupil and white without mirroring.

[corpusdei]

Wow, I'm having trouble hearing you over the sound of how awesome you are. 

That's definitely an improvement, many thanks for catching that!  Amazing how much difference that makes - I'll have to remember that one.

[battleaxe]

Hi,
   Re: skin that looks plastic after repair.  If you add a small amount of noise (1-2% uniform) the plastic look disappears.

[corpusdei]

*nods*  I was looking at that this morning.  Even with some added noise it still looks more glamour shot than I'm liking.  I think a big part of it is what I was doing with the frequency separation - I can definitely tell how it can be a really useful method for some things, but it also makes it really easy to wash out detail and end up with the photoshop equivalent of repairing a pocket watch with a hammer and chisel  :-\.

I'm probably going to back up a little bit and either take another approach or try tweaking the detail layer on a smaller scale.  One thing I noticed was that the patch tool seems to work very well in that case, and you don't end up with some of the same discoloration sometimes.