XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 1 N/08/08

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1 INTRODUCTION TO GRAPHICS Restoring Old Photographs II Information Sheet No. XXXX Repairing Emaciated Old Photos is important and you should understand it enough to make solid ground as a photo restorer. Here is a project on which a few minutes were previously spent: The entire process is much too long to fully show here. It simply would take too long, but these concepts will enable you to complete a project of this difficulty for the most part. First of course, make a copy of the background layer so you retain an image of the original and now you can work on the duplicate layer to restore pixels. Start off with the clone tool in this case. Because the background is so bad, lets start repairing that right away by taking good pixels and cloning them onto areas that desperately need it. Find a good area that you can use, Alt click to get that as the source point and then go ahead and move your clone around, clicking and dragging to clone that area onto the new area. Watch the crosshairs when you can so you don t overstep any boundaries. XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 1 N/08/08

2 You will be release clicking a lot and even more often to keep resampling your source clone if the area is not that large at all. This is ok as you can work fast. If you screw up an area and an edge shows up -- meaning you ve moved off the boundary then you can simply reclick again because with aligned turned off it will remember the same source point. With aligned turned on, the clone stamp will basically follow your brush with every new stroke, which works great if you have a large area that you want to clone exactly. Otherwise for now, resampling from the same source point can work until you have a larger area, then you can carefully drag over more. The background isn t super important, just get it clean looking. It might look like a pattern because you re using the same source point a lot but that s ok. You can then start moving into fixing pixels by cloning on the actual portrait itself. Here you will have to be more careful and dainty for obvious reasons. We are restoring a person back to life and want to be as realistic as possible. Here cloning part of the hair to cover it up is shown since it is all black anyways. Fix areas that you know aren t going to be a problem first. Once you ve fixed the background to where it should be. I ll continue to use the clone stamp tool XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II on these paper 2 tears to replace good N/08/08 skin

3 from a similar or close area to cover it up with. This is definitely a job for the clone stamp. Carefully sample from similar areas by Alt clicking and then using a small brush cover up and get rid of the marks with skin. Now here is another method so go ahead and create a new blank layer by clicking on the new layer icon On this part of the face where there are parts missing use the clone stamp by centering it on the area where there is a source you can draw from (alt clicking) and then carefully moving the brush up the side of the face keeping it centered and then clicking and carefully painting to get it aligned. and with the clone stamp selected, choose Use all Layers. It took 3 times to get it right so use Ctrl Z to go back in history to try and get it aligned just properly. Dont be afraid to do this. You want to get it just right and centered properly so you have a continuance in line structure of the face. This will allow you to collect a sample from all visible layers while still simultaneously being able to clone onto a new blank layer. XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 3 N/08/08

4 Notice that the visible right side of the hairline/face from our perspective looks ok, so what you re to do is clone that onto the new blank layer, carefully watching the crosshairs so you only copy the hair and not the background. Since the clone part of the good side of the head is on it s own layer you can go ahead and go to Edit: Transform: Flip Horizontal to flip it around. Now use Ctrl T or Edit: Free Transform to rotate it into position on this side of the face. See where it is cloning on this new layer? Now, once you have cloned it to the point where you have captured that entire range from the ear to the recession of the hair (in this case) then you can move it around with the move tool. This is a great technique that you can use since human faces are mostly symmetrical.. so keep this in mind: taking good parts and borrowing them to repair missing or damaged parts. XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 4 N/08/08

5 Continue rotating until the hairline matches and move or nudge it into place where it sets. Now use the clone stamp on a new layer with Use all Layers clicked and clone the good eye onto the other eye on the blank layer. Go ahead and flip it horizontal. Now you can take a soft eraser and carefully go in and get rid of any visible edges if you want but we re still going to have to do more repair on this part of the face before the project is complete. Create a new blank layer. YIKES. Ok, Ctrl T to free transform that in place; no need to scale. Hey if you ve got one good eye...feel free to be a digital donor for this person. Retouching is like makeup & nip/tuck and portrait restoration is often like digital surgery. Anyways, get the eye in place where it looks right. XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 5 N/08/08

6 damaged part of the face. Then maybe I can carefully heal or clone from the other side of the face; it s mirror to improve the cloned pixels once there are some of the (forehead) pixels there for color and placement. You can hide it with the layers eyeball to get it to line up and move it in place as shown so you don t have to just eyeball it. You can use a soft eraser here to carefully clean up any fringe pixelse that do not fully match with the surrounding area (very faint) but you want to be exact. You can organize these adjustment layers and parts layers into a layer set for now. I recommend keep an original copy of the.psd so you can go back and make changes for your client, etc. instead of merging everything together. It s ok to keep working/ improving on the duplicate layer though as long as you want to keep all of that. But keeping the eyes separate gives you more flexibility, etc. And of course you ll save a copy for web as.jpeg which will auto flatten all of the layers and retain your.psd If there are layers that you know you want to merge together then go ahead and link then and then use Ctrl E to put them onto one layer. Go ahead and look at other areas that need work. Here I m using the clone stamp because the forehead looks ok I can sample it and make the brush smaller to start filling in the area between her eye and the still XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 6 N/08/08

7 Remember to use layer sets to organize layers and that you still have to click on a layer itself to work on that particular layer. So here is the before and after...of course you can continue tweeking it until it is perfect. These techniques are just the tip of the ideberg. XXXX - RESTORING OLD PHOTOGRAPHS II 7 N/08/08