Stain removal

[Z Z]

Hello,

I have been reading the posts for the past several months and haven't quite seen how to remove the stain that is on this picture:

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=10ysMk7oc38mOPlwpkLiU23IMX91

Its from an old b+w photo from around 1960 or so. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[TonyW]

You might want to scan in RGB mode and post that image. Sometimes the stain is in one of the colour channels and that makes it a lot easier to get rid of.

Tony

[GaryK]

Hi ZZ

Welcome to the forums.

I had a quick shot with the greyscale version... dodge worked pretty good on the shirt. Seems to be my tool of choice the past couple. :eek:

Sorry I closed it before saving so no sample right now.

[Z Z]

TonyW - you were right about the color of the stain. Here is a color version:

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1KG9fziUHPrlk8cxuJit2SUqRzg3X

I'll experiment with it in the meantime....

GaryK - I seem to remember another post, perhaps yours, that used dodge and burn. I tried to see if I could use it, but did not really know where to begin. I'd appreciate it if you could offer some instructions.

Thanks in advance.

ZZ

[Daviskw]

Hi ZZ

I did not spend much time with the picture so it is not the best but here is a way to repair it.

If you have PSE3 and Grants tools check the red color channel. It has only a small amount of stain. To save the red channel just change the mode to grayscale then back to RGB.

If you don't have Grants tools no problem I did this pic without using the red channel.

I carefully selected a section of the mans shirt from his tie left to the stain line. I used a soft brush so the stain edge would blend. I only selected that section you do not need to select the whole picture. Then I opened a levels adjustment layer and using the center or gamma slider I did my best to lighten the stain.

Then I clicked on the layer mask...picked a black brush and anywhere I wanted to lighten the picture I just painted the lightness on.

When I got the picture close I opened a blank layer and used the healing brush and spot healing brush to blend and remove some spots.

When you do it you will take the time to leave the clothing wrinkle shadows and such I just did a fast job

Butch


http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/9800/10ysmk7oc38moplwpkliu23imx98ns.th.jpg (http://img51.imageshack.us/my.php?image=10ysmk7oc38moplwpkliu23imx98ns.jpg)

[Wendy]

Hi there ...

I just checked and I seem to have made a note that Channels is included in Grant's tool set for PSE4 too :)

Here is a link to Grant's tools:

http://www.cavesofice.org/~grant/Challenge/Tools/Files.html

Wendy

[TonyW]

Butch: Nice job. I did much the same thing but used the Richard Lynch toolset to split out the red channel. I also tried a photo filter technique that works quite well. I made a rough selection of the stain with a soft edged selection brush and added a masked photo filter adjustment layer and two hue/saturation adjustment layers one with the stain masked and one with the selection inverted so the non-stained bits were masked. I set the saturation slide all the way to the left on both.

Then in the photo filter layer I used the old photographers technique of picking the complementary colour and used a cyan filter and adjusted the density to eliminate as much of the stain as possible. Then by jiggling the the lightness sliders on the two hue/sat layers you can match the stained and unstained areas quite easily.

As you did I used the healing brush to clean up the edges. It works very nicely.

I might try playing with the photo filter method some more as I was surprised how well it works and I have a few old stained pics that I've been meaning to dig out and work on. It did occur to me that by reading the stain colour I might be able to pick the best filter color to eliminate it.

Tony

[GaryK]

Hey ZZ

Butch has done such a great job, I'm not sure you need any info on the dodge and burn tool. :)

The tool is the last one in the toolbar. Just click on it and open it. Pick the tone that looks like a sucker.

Now for the hard part :)

Pick a soft edged brush, and set the opacity to around 10%, and pick midtones from the pulldown.
The hard part is not setting the opacity too high.. it's way to easy to want to see things change right away. More brush strokes is better in this case. This keeps the changes subtle. Seeing as it is a b/w photo youmay be able to up it a bit.

One other thing do this on a copy of the original, or at the very least on a copy of the original (background) layer.. or both :D :D

[Daviskw]

It is fun trying different ways and techniques. Since the shirt was supposed to be white I decided to try Tony’s idea of a photo filter. But rather than an adjustment layer I used just a levels and the info dialog box. With the eyedropper I found some average values in the stain. The highest was the red value at 210, so all I had to do was raise the green and blue values to 210 to get a good white. That way instead of just using cyan I could get the exact value needed to neutralize to white. It worked like a charm. I did mask the area first. Then the healing brush did the rest.

I tried just using the colorcast tool first but it did not do a good job.

Butch


http://img326.imageshack.us/img326/7417/1kg9fziuhprlk8cxujit2suqrzg1nv.th.jpg (http://img326.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1kg9fziuhprlk8cxujit2suqrzg1nv.jpg)

[TonyW]

Butch: Amazing how many ways there are to do things in Elements. I also used the color replacement tool to replace the stain colour with a sample colour from the unstained portion. That works pretty well too although you have to up the lightness of the the stained area with a masked layer adjustment to blend in as the colour replacement tool leaves it slightly darker (in colour mode). It does a very nice job on touching up the faintly stained areas though. Won't work in PSE4 because of the bug in the colour replacement tool that won't let you use the Sampling once mode.

Tony

[Z Z]

Thanks everyone for the quick help. I now have several techniques to try.

I've been using PS3 for over a year (I haven't really thought about upgrading to PS4 yet), but only discovered this forum about a month ago. As other people have said in posts, I'll probably go back and redo some of the old photos I've worked on after realizing how basic my approach had been.

That said, I'll certainly don't mind it if you keep offering more suggestions....

Thanks again, ZZ