Really need some help

Hi all,

I'm going to have to be a bit cheeky and ask for help. I have an old photo that means a lot to a family friend of mine that has an old tea stain on it. I was wondering if some kind soul on here would be able to use their PS skills to remove the stain as this is way above my PS ability!

the link to the pic is:

http://www.pbase.com/s​tark/image/69602224

any help would be gratefully received.

kindest regards,

Nick

Nick, your request appears to me to be a major project. The stain is on several people's faces, eyes, and detailed background areas. Fixing this would probably take hours. Of course there's always the possibility that I'm just slow. For sure it would be good practice for anyone who has the time and which I don't have at the moment. If anyone cares to take on this challenge, please post the amount of time spent and what tools you used.

Here's a 5 minute edit.

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Fantastic! how did you do that??

no really, how did you do that?

Thanks.

Kindest regards,

Nick

Wellll.... I just looked at the picture and pondered...

The picture as a whole has a reddish-magenta tint. The stain has a distinct color that is not the same color as the rest of the image. I poked around, looking at the different color channels, and lo! The red channel was mostly free of stain. The stain appeared most prominently in the blue channel. I then used a channel mixer in monochrome mode, starting with 100% red, 0 everything else. I slowly brought the blue channel into the negative area (subtracting more "stain" than normal image) and compensated by increasing the red (adding more of the image almost without stain). When I got a balance I liked, I applied it to the image. I then just did a simple levels, then cloned out the hair. This took about 5 minutes total

I hope that explained it fairly well - let me know if you still have any questions .

edit : before applying the channel mixer, I used "levels" individually on the three channels to bring them to reasonable black and white quality (barely clipping to black and to white, reasonably spaced gamma). This may or may not affect the results.

By the way, there's probably a more elegant (and accurate) way to do this in the LAB colorspace. I have a book, "Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace" which talks about photo restoration using differences in color (such as selecting only the white scratches on a sepia-toned image and using that selection to mask edits). It's a generally all-around good book, though I haven't had time to read most of it yet

Wow Cody, I see now why I like this forum so much--I learn a lot. I was afraid someone would be able to fix it in 5 minutes, negating my earlier post, but I'm glad you did. I never thought to look at separate color channels to fix something like this. Also, thanks for the explanation of how you went about it. Good stuff.

Here is my go at it. Same basic steps as Cody only I rotated the picture a little and croped out the excess canvas area. Then I cloned out a couple of hairs, the rip and the photo holder corners. A little dodge and burn to try and reduce the contrast in the worst stain areas. This took about 20 minutes total.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

Thanks very much guys, I really appreciate it, would one of you mind emailing me the full size edit for the image?

Cody, thanks very much for your detailed workflow.

kindest regards,

Nick

Hey Cody, thanks: I learned something.
When I saw this first, I thought that it would be a very long, labor intensive project.
Since it turned out it wasn't, I gave it a go, and tried to maintain the original 'feel' of the image. Nice learning experience: (sharpened for web)
Original PSD can (temporary) be downloaded here. <s>It's uploading now, but that might take a while, since its a bit over 50Mb </s>
edit: The actual cloning I 'left as an exercise for the reader'
edit2: Okay, I turned on my brain for a minute, and resized the psd. The file is now about 2Mb... You can drag and drop all top layers to the original jpg and resize them to fit

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Stark wrote in post #2211710
Thanks very much guys, I really appreciate it, would one of you mind emailing me the full size edit for the image?

Nick,

There is a link on my first post (full sized image) to the full-res JPEG of my edit.

codex0,
Whilst this fix is simple to you I must say I am totally impressed by the results having seen the original. I really do need to think differently about these things than I do.

Thanks for the lesson

Hi, here is one more edit job...I also removed a few of the imperfections
Full size:
http://www.pbase.com/i​maginee/image/69664951

Take care~Linda

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I had some like that, but not as bad, so I took a close up of the stain & used that to WB the cam, then took a shot of the pic. Instant "no stain".

Thank you all for your help.

regards,

Nick