Welcome to my nightmare.

[Tess (Tassie D)]

I've been tearing my hair out on this one. As you can see theres heavy damage to the face and no other pics to reference. I've still got to add the cross back and whiten up the cloth where his hands are. Is what I've done believable or do I need to do less on the face? I can just make out the shape of the mouth but I think it would look funny having a mouth in the middle of confetti.
BTW the background doesnt look like that on the large one, it ended up weird when I reduced the kb.

[Ausimax]

Hi Tassie D,

Sorry I can't help you, I am absolutely hopeless with this sort of damage, the only thing I can suggest is that you check out this thread by Kurt Struve he had a face with similar damage and maybe his methods would help you.

http://www.oprworkshop.org/forum/index.php?topic=434.0

Max

[GP]

Hi Tassie

I looked at your picture, the blue channel had a lot of information. I copied and pasted it in the red and green channels and it looks like this:



I don't know if this helps in any way, but it gives you a good idea how his face looks like. There is also a great tut. on how to use this information http://www.oprworkshop.org/forum/index.php?topic=394.0
  Good luck!

Gerlinde

[glennab]

Gerlinde, We're definitely on the same wavelength.  I played with the blue channel as well, and got this image


It may or may not have any more detail than yours.  I can never tell until I actually post.  I pulled the blue channel into a separate file and lightened it a bit with levels.  That blue channel is a wealth of information at times.

Tassie, I think his collar is a bit too tall, and his shoulder and arm on our right seem just a little fuller in the original to me.  Other than refinements (especially softening the edges and making his hair a little less spiky) and getting that "lost" information on the image, he looks great.

Glenna

[Tess (Tassie D)]

lol you all found the same as I did at 1am this morning. I split all the cmyk channels and the yellow gave me the same pic. I'm finding it hard to get a good line on the mouth because as soon as I zoom in all you see is those darned white spots and there is no definition on the teeth.
I'll keep plugging away with it, thanks everyone for the hints.

[sanbie]

Wow Tess you have done great with it so far...and so quick!

Sanbie

[Ausimax]

Hi Tassie D,

These are a real pain when at a small size you can see all that detail and then when you get it to working size it is lost in the gunk.

What I do at times is add a layer on top and then sketch in all the detail I can see, then when you blow the image up you can use the sketched outline as a reference, hope that helps! ;)

Max

[Tess (Tassie D)]

Thanks Max, doing that now with some good results. If you saw my sketch though you'd fall off your chair laughing.

Hi Sanbie, glad to see you made it here.

[Tess (Tassie D)]

Well, with some great help and coaching  I'm almost there I think?
Here's where i'm at so far. Opinions, things I've missed, things horribly wrong?  :wow:

[OPRAng]

If it would help you, feel free to return the image in black and white. If you like, you can even turn in two, on in B&W and one in color...

Not much help, I know. But it might be handy to tuck away on the back burner for the toughies like this guy...

He really is a cutie, isn't he????

Angela

[glennab]

Hi Tess

I think you have the details of his face pretty accurate, but the lower portion of his face and ear have a flat, paint-by-number look.  I know it was a bear even getting that out of the mess that was there, but I think all you need to do is work on your shading and texture a little to get him more natural looking.  I'd pull up that blue channel from the original and use it as a template to get shading and contour and apply the healing brush to even out the texture in that area.  What I've found helps is to place my template above the restoration and add a "repairs" layer between the two.  Sample colors as best you can from your colored image -- even create your own if you have to, and carefully follow the shading on your template onto the repair layer with a medium sized soft brush at very low opacity (building up the shading slowly gives you the subtlety necessary to make it look the most accurate).   Then get your texture from the more natural-looking areas (i.e. his forehead) and apply the healing brush to anything that looks too smooth.  One thing I discovered with my current restoration is that what sometimes seems a disadvantage with the healing brush when it picks up color from, for instance the face to the background, and you end up with a weird combination of the two can work wonders when you're blending similar colors for shading and trying to get a comfortable transition.  I hope that makes sense, because it took me a lot of trial and error to discover times when that works, and even then you may have to use some judicious cloning to keep the contour where you want it.  At any rate, he looks really good other than that miserably mucked up area that you had to try to reproduce, and I think even that will look fine with some contour and texture tweaks.

Glenna (aka Ramblin' Rose!)