Fix Your Photos A 30.8-18.10.2006

Index * Week1 * Week 2 * Week 3 * Week 4 * Week5 * Week 6 * Home

This is a Krisses's assignment's site for Photoshop course provide by Janee Aronoff

All my images does include Adobe RGB (1998) profile ICC-profile. The best way to look them is to use Safari.

Week 5

In this week we are going to,

Scan a photo effectively
Work with color/sepia
Use Channel Splitting to make a grayscale
Use a Merged Visibles layer
Use a Micro View Window
Repair dust and scratches
Fix mold and water stains
Fix uneven tonality
Fix uneven coloration
Resize tears
Resize a photo

Restoration vs. Retouching

Restoration will keep the photograph as original as possible, rather than including things that aren't there. Retouching allows you to move parts of the other photos, change colors, removal of blemishes, cropping, sharpening and so on.

So this my first image try to be more restoration than retouching. The girl in the image is me and the bird, fledgling of the magpei, fallen too early from it's nest. My aunt found it and took care of it. The bird become tame and stay with us three years before it found a spouse and didn't came back anymore. We called it Kalle. The image is taken and made by my uncle and I did keep it in desk drawer many years. Now it's placed in the album. Even the quality of the image isn't very high, it's priceless for me as my uncle isn't alive anymore and the negatives has lost.

Because it's so cute image we can see that it has got a lot of damage too. Looks like it's even rolled. The skin of the photo is full of small marks and scratches. I took this picture in the evening under a table lamp with very warm yellow light. Didn't care about the colors, but here we can see well those scratches. The rollover image is part of scanned photo. They were most difficult part in this project and I'm still having some left.

As I said the most difficult part were those small scratches all over the image. This image is still in process, but I made it quickly as finished as possible to get it in here, before our course ends. I have tried several different ways to correct just those small scratches as you see from my layers. I also tried to get some more light to my face without blowing out my skirt and hair. I'm not going to explain more this work, coos' layers will show well my workflow. I also tried channel splitting, but it didn't gave any help to this image, so I left it away.

This next photograph is my friend's s photo. The lady in the image is her sister. His husband kindly help me to get these images scanned with his scanner as I'm not having own yet. They are scanned to 600 dpi resolution (30,4Mt) and the file size in the corrected psd-document was 162Mt.

layers part1 This image do have blue pen marks in the neck, so I found it easiest way to copy blue and red channels as a layers in here. Red channel looks best, but it did have those pen marks in the neck, so I also copied blue channel and made mask to red and painted those pen marks away. That made a little tonal difference so I add level's adjustment layer and adjust the masked areas to fit red channel.

Then Layer1 is Merged Visible layer. Shift+Optio/alt+Cmd/Ctrl+E. I write it shortly Merged in my layers.
It give a view of the whole image without flattening the layers. I use it all the time and I think it's very useful keyboard shortcut and worth to learn.

Then I have corrected the tonality of the whole image with levels and curves. And that's all in this first layer's image. The merged layer is same in both images.

layers part2 This dust and scratches layer do remove mostly the scanner dust and the dust over the photograph, but doesn't touch much scratches. I wanted to control them on the other ways.

So next I started correcting background with clone tool, but did remember one podcast where I saw using Vanishing point cloning and decide to try it in here. My point was making it as solid as possible, but keeping that old texture in it. I planned to correct later the shadows with Janee's shading brush. That did work quite well, but I add blurring tool level too to get some smoothness to it.

The next level is cloning level where I corrected the the bigger spots and scratches from the face.

Then there is that background shading layer. I used a very big smooth brush with low opacity around 20.

Healing and blur level include more corrections to face area.

I know I have made a mistake in here as I didn't make own layer for the history brush, but didn't get it working right away and I was busy doing this ready. On this layer I use history brush in screen mode to add some light to eyes.

This shadow layer is final correcting layer. It's including shadows in the neck, over the eyes and jaw line.

Looking quite good, but I did make the hair too dark and have lost some details, so I add levels adjustment layer with mask and paint some details back. I add some sepia toning with hue/saturation level. That add nice soft mood to this work.
For the final touch just a little USM sharpening. (50-1,1-0)

So this is it. This was the last week of this course. I would really like to thank Janee for her excellent course material and all the help she have offered so well. Many thanks also for Joanne and John. You are doing so great work and giving good feedback and advices. I also like to thank all my course mates for seeing your incredible masterpieces and for the time you have spent giving your comments and having so much discussion in classboard. We did made a very good course together. I never stop amazing how much more I learn on this online studying than having a school in my city. The most of you I will see Janee's next course Fix Your Photos B or Photorealistic Painting B. Judy and Susa we will see in next month on Dreamweaver course. I'm so glad you came with me. See you there.

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