Photo Retouching Question

[dafipp]

We have found an old baby picture that has some damage to it from ink, water and age. I would like to fix some of the problems before I reprint the picture. My only tool is Xara X. Where should I begin? Any helpful tips you can give will be most appreciated.

dafipp
http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[dafipp]

We have found an old baby picture that has some damage to it from ink, water and age. I would like to fix some of the problems before I reprint the picture. My only tool is Xara X. Where should I begin? Any helpful tips you can give will be most appreciated.

dafipp
http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[gwpriester]

In Photoshop you could use the clone tool to copy small sections of the photo and then paint over the damaged area.

Duplicate the photo and draw a small 50 pixel circle over part of the undamaged area. Select the small circle and the photo and combine shapes... intersect shapes. Apply a bit of feathering.

Now drag and drop duplicate shapes (click the right mouse button to drop the duplicate before you release the left mouse button) until you begin to see a difference in the color. Make a new duplicate and a new circle and intersect shapes for a slightly darker or lighter area as needed.

Gary

Gary Priester

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[dafipp]

dafipp

[Soquili]

Hi Dafipp,

I see you only have XaraX to work with. I imported your image. Copied it to the ClipBoard. Drew a rectangle over an area near the writing, selected both and used Arrange Shapes > Intersect shapes. Used that rectangle to cover parts of the writing. It will be a long process, but you could use other shapes and cover up other parts of the writing. When you have it to your liking, you could make a bitmap copy and try using bitmap effects. Use some transparencies to bleach and or change the saturation/contrast.

Hope that helps.

Soquili

[gwpriester]

Sean Sedwards has a Search and Replace plug-in filter available in the Xara Xone Shareware section which lets you replace a selected color with another. You can also adjust the tolerance to one or two colors to more.

I would try sampling a section of the ink and writing down the RGB values and then sampling the adjacent area without the ink stain and replacing a narrow range of color. This will require a lot of repetition but it should work as well.

Or you could do a very general search and replace with a high tolerance and then use the circular clone technique I described before.

One more thing to try is to try a circular fill sampling colors from the photo with the Color Picker tool in the Color Editor to get your range of colors.

Good luck.

Gary

Gary Priester

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[Christine Farrelly]

You could post the full image and we could all try to see who could come up with the best output. I for one would love to have a go at this.

Christine

[gwpriester]

(er, I guess it helps if you don't delete the photo before you upload it :-o)

I recreated the solid backgrounds using a Fractal Plasma fill with two very similar colors sampled from the photographs background and with the size of the fill very tiny.

I tried my method of small samples of background for the head without much luck though I might try again with much smaller pieces.

I basically recreated the forehead shape and created an elliptical fill sampling colors from the actual photo. I duplicated that and added the fractal plasma fill and applied feathering and linear transparency to each.

Gary

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[This message was edited by gwpriester on April 18, 2003 at 05:43.]

[dafipp]

Hey....I'm making some progress. Thanks for all of the ideas. I have tried several different ways and have settled on a modification of the ones presented. Instead of using intersect for my replacement shapes I am using slice. I have two copies of the picture open. One is my keeper that I am applying corrections on top of and the other one I am cut chunks out of the clean sections. Using the slice command allows me to see where I took the peice from for future reference....less trial and error.

Christine.....sorry about the challenge. Great idea that would probably result in a better picture than I will get on my own *BUT* the picture is not of me. The picture is of my mother-in-law and my wife is not too keen on having it out on the internet where "any wierdo can oogle her". http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/eek.gif No hard feelings I hope.

Gary....another great suggestion. If I wasn't so far along I would probably start over with the idea of creating a whole new background.

Here is a portion that I have completed. I am currently working on the forehead.

Thanks for all the help.
dafipp
http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Christine Farrelly]

over the challenge. Looks like your doing a great job anyway.

I must admit that when I do something like this I usually convert to grey scale first - just doing that can get rid of some of the blemishes. You can always then re-convert to a sepia tone.

I have attached one I did of my brother as a child. All work done in XaraX.

Christine