Off topic - old photos

[handrawn]

again I'm impressed

[steve.ledger]

Very nice work John - also good techniques, thanks for sharing.

[covoxer]

Thanks.
Here's some more.

[steve.ledger]

Show off...



(BTW: Brilliant..!)

[handrawn]

and now... the tutorial?

[Soquili]

Bravo John! Very well done!

[covoxer]

Well, not a tutorial, but some steps I've made here.

1. Set contone dark to black and contone light to white. We only need the brightness information from this picture so remove all the color.
2. Adjust dynamic range. Open levels tool. In the histogram move the white triangle to the right edge of the hump and the black triangle to the left edge of the hump. You may also need to adjust gamma but I found it acceptable in this image.

Now we may retouch damaged areas. Depending on the image and the damage, we may use different techniques. Here's what I've done with this picture.
3. Looking at the large background area you can see traces of bents and irregularities in brightness. In reality this was a monotone wall. So the best way is to replace it with a single color shape. Draw a shape of the background area and apply liner gradient fill from left to right as it was lightened diagonally. Don't forget to feather edges a bit.
4. Brightened areas at the bottom and right. Make a clone of the original image. Adjust it's darkness to make the brightened area properly dark. To make it easy, resize the image object with the shape editor tool so that only the area in question is visible. Then open levels tool. Notice that you see the histogram of the visible part of image. Make it dark. Now set the vertical linear transparency to the object. Adjust it so that it blend with the original image. To repeat the same for the right side simply clone this object, reshape it to original size or to only cover the right side, and apply horizontal transparency gradient. I have also added one more copy with a elliptical transparency to cover the brighter area at the lower right corner.

5. There are some dark spots at the bottom of the picture. But they are easy to hide. Create a circle shape slightly larger than a spot. Make it dark gray. Add circular transparency. Adjust it so that it blends with the image at that area. Duplicate (drag+right click) over all spots. Make some final adjustments if needed.

Details. There are two good things that can be made to a portrait - increase sharpness of detail and blur smooth areas.
6. Clone the original shape. Add a bit of sharpening. I used 9 here. Cut it to the shape of the face. Add feathering. This shape may be not precise.
7. Clone original shape. Add some blur. Cut to the shape of the smooth areas - cheeks for example. Add feathering.
8. Notice that there is a clipping on the upper right area of the forehead and a bit at left. Hide it with semitransparent objects with feathering, or circles with circular transparency.

That's all I've done to restore it. More or less. Open xar file to see all these objects.

Now to make it sepia just add a brown rectangle with stained glass transparency on top. Adjust transparency for realistic look.

It's not particularly hard to color this image. Drop the sepia step.

9. The background area can be colored directly since it is gradient filled object.
10. Draw flat colored shapes over the areas of the same tint. This may be not perfectly precise. Set flat stained glass transparency. Adjust its level. Add some feathering.
11. We could stop here. However this simplistic approach does not look well on the face as it's saturation fades in the highlighted areas. It's simple to fix though. Clone the face shape. Open levels tool. Set very low gamma (as we want to alter only the bright areas). I set 0.2. Add flat bleach transparency to this. Adjust its level. Now we have realistic highlights.

[Allen James]

Wow, some excellent lessons there from Xhris, Bill, John and others.

I'll bet the old USS Photoshop is getting a little nervous, with HMS Xara circling it, even though USS Wikipedia doesn't seem to know.