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"This is the only photo I have about my parents. I
scanned it and tried to correct the flaws, but this is all
I managed to do. If possible, please help me to get the
best out of it."
tarjanyipapa
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At the first glance, this did not seem to be a difficult
case, and after all, it wasn't, but it did need some time
and patience. Regular readers of Digiretus will find the
techniques described in this article familiar.
The biggest issue with the picture are the strong chafing
marks. Of course, it is also slightly blotchy, wrinkled
and yellowed, but these things are easy to correct. Our
aim was to preserve the original analogue character and
graininess of the photo. Unfortunately, the image we received
was pretty small— enough for a monitor, but insufficient
for a print.
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First,
we cropped the edges since they were unnecessary. And you
can still make a border for yourself if you need one. To
do the cropping, press M to invoke the
Rectangular Marquee Tool, select the appropriate
area, and click Image/Crop.
Then click Layer/Duplicate Layer and carry
on working on the upper layer.
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Here
comes the remedy for old, scratched, dusty, chafed photos,
the Filter/Noise/Dust&Scratches feature.
We used this to remove the white chafing marks from the
image. Radius was set to 5
and Threshold to 12. The
noise filtering will be bloody strong this way, but it manages
to remove most of the marks.
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We
set the blending mode of the layers to Darken,
which brought back most of the darker details without reviving
the white chafes.
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We
created a vector mask on the upper layer by clicking its
icon. Make sure this mask remains selected!
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Until now, it was an easy job. This is where the hard work
begins!We needed to bring back the important details that
were blurred by the noise filter. We used a simple Brush
tool for that. You need to zoom into the picture
for increased painting accuracy, and select a smaller brush
with a soft edge. We used brush sizes mostly between 5
and 15 pixels, depending on the size of the detail
painted over at the moment. We used the brush to paint on
the newly created vector mask, in black. The painted areas
on the mask became transparent and the lower, unaffected
layer showed through. The brush was used around details
of the eyes, mouths, hair and clothes, taking care about
not to paint over chafed details, because that would have
made the white marks reappear. This needed us to toggle
the upper layer on and off constantly, in order to see where
we had to be careful and where were the details that needed
to be brought back.
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The rest of the defects were removed using the Healing
Brush and the Patch Tool. The
Healing brush was used
wherever finer textures had to be cloned from one area to
another (here's the
article describing its use), while the Patch
Tool worked mainly for the background,
selecting a larger homogeneous area and dragging it over
to a more mottled one. Of course we repeated these actions
frequently while zooming in and out of the picture to see
where further surgery was necessary.
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From
now on, we did not need the two separate layers and the
mask anymore, so we merged them using Layer/Flatten
Image.
To remove the yellow tint, you can press Shift+Ctrl+U.
Since the picture lacked contrast rather much, we used the
Image/Adjustments/Levels feature to set light levels
right. For lazier people, Auto Contrast
can also work.
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A few tiny sleights of the hand, using the Clone
brush to get rid of any smaller defects—just like
with the Healing Brush above—, a thin white
border using Image/Canvas Size, and we're
done.
Thank you for
visit our blog.
Hope you can learn something new from this tutorial. You can share your thought
& suggestion with us though comments below.
Thank you…
Reference: digiretus
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