I came across “Dave Cross’ Fix it challenge” via Scott Kelby’s blog. Basically each week Dave posts an image in need of some serious retouching, participants fire up photoshop and do their worst, posting the resulting images in the pool from which winner is chosen. I had been on the look out for something to practice my photoshop skills on, and being a highly competitive person I couldn’t resist having a go.

This week’s image is a period photograph of a woman standing in front of a painted background. My immediate thoughts were, on top of fixing the obvious damage, I would attempt to restore the colour that would have been present - had colour film been invented at the time! This is something I’ve not attempted before on a photograph so it’s an ideal learning opportunity. In the end it turned out to be somewhat more challenging than I had expected! What follows is a step by step breakdown of what I did and why I did it…

The original image looks something like this:

Firstly I rotated the image, cropped the border and fixed the corners. Next job was to repair the tears. This is a fairly mechanical process, working along each tear I copied adjacent areas with similar appearance to fill the gaps (a process made easier by the lack of colour).

Having sorted the major tears I removed dust spots accumulated during scanning, and desaturated the image to produce a blank slate to begin colouring:

The original had an uneven exposure across the print so I adjusted the levels independently on several different areas to maximise the contrast. I applied a slight noise reduction - I didn’t want to lose too many details as the image wasn’t very sharp to begin with. To this end I sharpened the image using the high pass filter:

Next step is to colourise the image. I decided not to go for subtlety (if I was going to spend time putting colours in I wanted it to be bright!) so using a little artistic license I thought I’d paint a sunset in the background. In the past I’ve coloured line drawings by setting the greyscale image to multiply in order to darken a layer of colour placed underneath. I started to apply some colours in the same way but quickly realised I wasn’t getting the result I wanted:

I went back to the drawing board thinking of ways to separate colour from tone. I immediately thought of the L.A.B colour mode. That wasn’t the answer by itself, as that would require painting colour onto two channels simulataneously. But it did get me thinking along the right sort of lines, and after some experimentation I was able to recreate the way that L.A.B mixes colour and tone using the overlay blending more.

Sampling a few colours from a sunset image from stock.xchng I added colour to the sky. By selecting each section individually I could layer up the colours beneath the greyscale so they overlapped each other slightly, avoiding gaps. For certain areas I copied the greyscale image and applied a gradient overlay, to enable me to apply different colours to different brightnesses, for a more realistic look. For example specular highlights on wood are usually grey, even if the wood has a rich colour. To replicate this, the gradient overlay I used went from white, to brown and then to black in the shadows. This technique is particularly important for skin as it reflects light differently from most objects. Despite trying many gradients I was unable to get a completely convincing result:

The left hand part of the backdrop was coloured using a gradient then additional details were roughly

at this point I’m trying to replicate a photo of a painting, so accuracy isn’t of the upmost importance (at least that’s my excuse). Likewise, instead of painting in the trees on the right, I just let the sunset colours take over. This is the colourisation result:

Next I cropped the image slightly to remove an awkward area on the right and to remove some of the top of the image, which lacks detail. To give the image a ‘digital camera’ look I added a fairly large amount of colour noise. This also served to cover up some of the less convincing parts, and increase the perceived level of colour detail. Finally I tweaked the levels and colour balance of the whole image:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 4:50 pm and is filed under News, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.