Glenna's Newest Toughie

[marylou]

Up until now I've always ignored the Deinterlace filter and I don't no why. It works wonders on this photo, thanks Ziaphra for bringing it to our attention.

Good Luck Glenna with your photo, can't wait to see your progress! :)

[Ausimax]

Thats the great think about this site, you can learn so much, and its dealing with real problems that we can follow along with.

I have so many tutorials and extracts from books dealing with " Badly damaged images" and most of the images they deal with would be struggling to get into the Moderate category here, there just seems to be nothing dealing with the degree of damage we encounter here.

Glenna, I think I would be removing the texture to work on the image, and replacing it later, after using the De-interlacing filter I carried out a rough restoration in about 30 minutes, where having to deal with the texture takes a lot more time and trouble keeping the texture even, and I have doubts about this being canvas texture, canvas has a warp and weft, this only has lines running horizontal, may be some sort of art board.
Anyway you now have plenty of good advice to help you on you way," Go to it Tiger" :loveit:

Max

[glennab]

Good Morning!

Ok gurus, I've run into a couple of snags.  The De-interlace filter does NOTHING to my image.  I tried it several times and saw no difference at all.

I'm thinking the FFT filter may either be only for PCs or not compatible with my MacPro (I've had other compatibility problems because the hardware is so different from the older Macs.) Anyway, I placed the two FFT files in my Photoshop Plug-Ins folder, as instructed, and nothing appeared in my filters menu (the files look nothing like the others in the folder).  Does anyone know more about this?  I was very impressed with the information on the website and the example shown, so I'd like to try it.  Gotta find it first!

Chris, your curves trick did the best job on the colors.  They don't look bad.  There are several large areas with a lot of black (I'm guessing mold) that I'll just have to battle my way through with cloning & healing.

What amazes me is the background.  I'd never have guessed that it was a gradient, and it's "artsy" enough that I'm going to try to clean it up rather than replace it (my usual routine when there's no detail).

Even with all the downloading, printing and reading, I managed to get some cleaning up accomplished, but not enough to post yet.

Kurt, I'm not far enough into my channels book to quite understand your directions on using a channel to help with the clean-up.  It sounds as if it's not particularly complicated, but I can't figure it out.  Lack of experience!

Anyway, time to scoop poop and get ready for work.

It's cool today and the air conditioners are OFF. Whoo hoo!  Wish I could go out and work in the yard!  But noooooooo!

Have a great day, troops!

GG

[kiska]

FFT is PC only.

[kstruve]

"De-interlace is a built-in filter in Photoshop and has been there for many versions now.  It's under Filter>Video>De-interlace.  It will get rid of small-scale (1 or 2 pixel) banding usually caused by the scan lines in video.  It won't do much of anything for the texture on your full resolution image."

De-interlace works fine on the screen resolution pics that people have been copying of off this thread, but it won't do anything on a high resolution image where the size of the texture you're trying to get rid of is more than 1 or 2 pixels across.

Glenna,

If you e-mail your high res photo to me, I'll run the FFT on it and send it back to you.

Kurt

[glennab]

Kurt -- that'd be great, and I'd appreciate it.  I can't find your e-mail address on the forum. You can e-mail it to me if you don't want to post it: [email protected]

Had a little bit of "bug" set-back today and had to leave work early, so am taking the evening off, but I'll watch for your info and send the file on to  you.  Thanks so much for your help.  It'll save me mucho work!

GG

[Ausimax]

Hi,

There is supposed to be a program that will do this (FFT)  on a Mac.

Quote:
There IS a mac version.
It's called ImageJ

Image J is part of The Image Processing Toolkit
Available Here for Free
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html
ImageJ runs on Linux, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Windows
The Docs are here
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/
And the bit about FFT is here
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/docs/menus/process.html#fft

It is Not a plugin but a complete program. You will need Java Installed.

End Quote:

This info is courtesy of Cameraken, at RetouchPRO.

I tried the FFT filters on Glenna's image, couldn't get a very good result, it may work better on the larger image, I tried them on several photos I had with texture, and I can't say I was impressed, probably doing something wrong again, though I worked through with a Tutorial.

Max

[kstruve]

Glenna,

As promised, I ran the FFT on your photo and e-mailed it back to you.  This is how it turned out:



Overall pretty good.  Just a couple of horizontal bands on the top and bottom.

Kurt

[Ausimax]

Kurt, nice job, don't know if this works but I read that if you extend the canvas slightly before you run the FFT filters it removes the texture right to the edge of the image.

Max

[kstruve]

Max,

I actually did that, and it did help quite a bit.  It seems like the edge of the image itself causes some interference when you use the FFT filter.  I'm sure there's a way of doing it better, but I didn't have much time to experiment with it last night.

Kurt

[Codeman]

Hi Glenna,

I found another way of dealing with the texture on this photo. I loaded the photo at the top of this topic into photoshop. Then made a copy of the layer and desaturated it.  I ran the high pass filter on the copied layer. Adjust the radius in the filter until about all that is visible are the lines of texture. For the posted picture I used a radius of 1.2 pixels. What you end up with is a field of gray with the lines of texture and a few other areas of high contrast such as the eyes and mouth. Now inverse this filtered layer and set the blend mode to overlay. This will lessen the texture lines. With the filtered layer selected hold down the alt key( PC )  and add a brighten/contrast adjustment layer. When the dialog box is displayed click on "Use Previous layer to Create Clipping mask". This will allow you to increase or decrease the effect of the filtered layer by adjusting the contrast slider. For the areas that you don't want to effect just create a mask for the filtered layer and paint out those areas with black on the mask. Likewise painting on the mask for the brightness/contrast layer  can selectively control the adjustment of the filtered overlay layer.

Also if  the filtered layer is not inverted you can use this same technique to sharpen a photo.

I hope this is useful.

Codeman

[glennab]

Hi Codeman

I've heard of using the high pass filter for sharpening, but not for cleaning up the type of mess I had.  Your technique is definitely going into my files for future use.  Honestly, the more I read this forum and study my restoration books, the more I realize that there are hundreds of ways to get to a similar result.  I love getting the type of feedback you've offered, because it makes me look at a challenge in a completely different manner.  Thanks a bunch for jumping in!

GG

And Max: Thanks for the information on Image J!  I'm going to file that away, too, because I think I'm going to rework the daughter's portrait and can try it on that.  I'm right now devouring Katrin Eismann's last iteration of her book on restoration, because it's been revamped for CS2.  I highly recommend it!  She's the ultimate guru.  Lots of new techniques and fascinating means by which to correct major flaws.  I'd hoped I could find something in it to help Chris with her parents' wedding photo, but not so far.  I'm keeping that in mind as I absorb all the information.  (the hard drive in my head is filling up and becoming very fragmented.  Is there a Norton in the house?)

Best to you all!

GG

[cmpentecost]

Thanks for keeping me in mind with my parent's wedding picture Glenna.  It is SO amazing what I have learned in these forums, and I'm always so glad to have someone new participate (welcome Codeman).  I have a lot of the books, which I reference a lot, but there is nothing like submitting a picture for feedback and learning how to correct the problem.  I thought I was pretty decent at restorations until I joined OPR.  Now, I realize how much I have to learn.  The joy of it all is that I have a great group of people to hold my hand and help me along.

Based on the terrific feedback you've gotten on this picture, I'm sure it will turn out beautiful.

Chris

p.s.  It's minus 8 degrees F here right now....what's your temp in FL??

[glennab]

Oh Chris, you really don't want to hear this!  It was in the low 70s today, sunny and gorgeous.  Hubby mowed the lawn and I did some work on my potted plants.  We had the house opened up to air out.  This truly IS why I live in Florida!  Supposed to go "down" to the low 60s for the next few nights. Brrrr!

I'm still looking for something to help with the wedding photo.  There was a method I thought might work, but it won't.  It would be so great if there were always shortcuts, but in some instances it's just "bite the bullet" time! I'm still reading, though, so I won't give up on trying to find something less daunting.

I'm at that point with my portrait.  I decided to recreate a similar background, so that clean-up was eliminated.  But both mom and daughter have some really funky colors in areas of their faces, mom's nose is barely perceptible and I'm not sure yet how to deal with that. The little one's face is coming along, and I'm working on her hair a little.

What amazes me still is the background color.  There's no way I'd have looked at the original and figured there was anything but muck.  It's a lovely blue to green gradient that I think I reproduced pretty faithfully.  Your advice on curves got me there, thanks so much!

I'm still feeling a bit punk from the flu, so I'm not going as quickly as I'd like to.  Tonight's been very productive, though, so hopefully I have momentum going and can get it finished before 2008!  Scooter has been sitting here with me all evening giving me instructions.  He's so very helpful!

SCOOTER, the smartest cat in the world! (and obviously the most energetic!)


Should have enough to post in a day or two.  You're right, the feedback has been tremendous.  I adore having all this expertise at hand!  Couldn't do it without you guys.  You're all so special to me!

Have a great Sunday.  G'night!

GG

[glennab]

Hi Gurus

I plan on posting my restoration tonight after I do more work on it, but I have a couple of questions.  I'm torn over the hair, because other than the area where the little girl's is covered with black, there's virtually no definition.  I don't know whether to try to create hair or just try to get the colors as close as possible and not worry about rendering detail.

There are several areas, especially on the girl's face and neck where the shadows are bluish, rather than darker shades of the skin color.  I need to adjust the color, but only in certain areas.  What I'm thinking is that I should just take care of the damage at this point, and when that part of the restoration is done, mask off the strangely shaded areas and adjust them once the file is flattened.  Sound reasonable?  Other suggestions?

Kurt, you mentioned using channels for color adjustment.  I just read Scott Kelby's book on channels, as well as a good portion of Katrin Eismann's tome on retouching & restoration and didn't come across anything that addresses correcting sporadic areas of funky color with channels.  Do you still recommend that?  If so, can you elucidate?  (I once asked our sales manager to elucidate for me, and he told me he doesn't do that sort of thing; he's a married man!)

Max and Kenny, the healing and cloning are coming along great.  I'm finally getting the feel for when to do which.  You're great tutors!

Any of you in the way of the awful storms up north, I'm praying that you stay warm and safe.

I won't rub in the fact that it's 80 degrees here, sunny and gorgeous.  (You can get back at me in the summer when you have wonderfully balmy weather and we're dying of heat stroke!)

Best to all of you!

GG