Help, newbie with a fadded family photo

[nitehawk]

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on this photo.  This was a photo of my aunts class that she taught in the California mountains around the late 1800's.  I'm stumped about what to do with the large amount of faded spots.  I've used the threshold adj layer to deal with the tone and have no idea which way to go from hear.  Thanks again for the help on the restorations we worked on.
                                                                                        Mike :)

[kjohnson]

I've not fiddled with Threshold much, seems to work for bringing up the tones though. As for the rest, well you've posted in the right section. Wow. .

[cmpentecost]

Hi Mike,

I'll do my best to help you on this. What I did is far from perfect, but perhaps it's a start.  I copied my Photoshop screen for you as well.



The first thing I did was a curves adjustment, which is shown in my image.  I think I clicked onthe man's vest on the left, and pulled it way down.  This darkened the right side a bit too much, so I used the gradient tool, with a blend of black to white, with the black being on the right hand side.

Then, I did another curves adjustment, clicking on the upper left hand corner for the color, and then dragging the curve down until the really faded part seemed to match the upper left corner.  Mind you, the rest of the image looks awful, but that's ok.  We are only concerned about matching the colors of the building that are faded.  I then filled the adjustment layer with BLACK, putting the image back to the original look.  I then took the paintbrush, lowered the opacity depending on the area I was painted, and painted over the faded area, bringing in the darker colors that the curves adjustment gave me.  I did this quickly, and it certainly needs more time and care than I gave to your photo, but this might be something that works. 

I hope I helped,and I hope this all made sense!

Christine

[glennab]

Hi Mike

Another option, which I find extremely helpful when I have a faded photo, is to duplicate  your background layer 3 or 4 times, set each layer to multiply and then play with the opacity on each layer. I got quite a bit of detail on this one by doing 3 duplicate layers with the first set to 100%, the second to 80-100% and then sliding the 3rd to around 35.  I'm working on an LCD monitor, which is really bright, so your values may have to be different from mine, but give it a try.  You'll still have some cloning, healing and probably dodging and burning to do, but I think multiplying your layers will give you a good start.

Glenna

P.S. Since I had a little bit of lunch time left, I thought I'd post what I got with the multiply layers and just a few levels tweaks and 10% burn on several of the faces (I actually discovered glasses on the blond woman who's 4th in from the left).



Now that I've looked at the uploaded photo compared to what I see on the copy on my computer, this one is darker.  So there's a definite descrepancy, but it'll give you the idea.  G

[Codeman]

Hi Mike,

I was playing with your photo and discovered a process to use as a start on the restoration. Put an empty layer on top of the photo and set its blend mode to overlay. Then take a soft paint brush with its blend mode set to multiply. Set the foreground color to black with an opacity set to about 50%. Then paint across the faded part. On some parts of the image the fading seems to go away. Play with the brush color, opacity, and blend mode of the brush to see the different amount of change that it causes. If you mess up you can erase that part of the layer. Mess up bad and throw away the layer and get a new one. You can can also put a mask on the layer to protect areas from change and change the opacity of the layer to decrease the amount of adjustment. You may want to use different layers for different parts of the image. One last thing is you should scan the image in a 16 bit per channel mode or the highest bits per channel that your scanner can do and then set photoshop to its 16 bit mode. Even if you are starting with an 8 bit per channel image set photoshop to 16 bit mode. It won't give you more detail for an 8 bit image but with all of the layers, blend modes and painting you will loose less information when the values of the pixels are calculated as you make changes to the image. When you are finally done you can convert a merged copy back to 8 bits for distribution.

Codeman

[Codeman]

Instead of setting the layer to overlay set it to softlight instead. It is not as aggressive as overlay.

Codeman

[kjohnson]

Oh and there's a short cut for going thru the modes so you can view them without having to click on each one. one way is to select a mode then use up/down arrow keys - this will take you thru all the modes. as i recall this one's just for pc's.

It was a tutorial on PS killer tips yesterday.