WG48

Thanks for your offer to help. My trial version of Affinity expired yesterday. Haven't bought the full version yet. Will get back to you if I do. Basically I was trying to follow the procedure I used in Photoshop CC. I ran into problems in step 5 and never could move on steps 6 & 7. Below is how to do the technique in Photoshop CC Making Specialized Masks From Colors In PS CC 1. You can exaggerate colors to select tarnish on a photo by making a Hue/Saturation adjustment of +70 or more. 2 Next look at the channels to see which one shows the damage best. Then use Channel Mixer on the RGB channel to subtract the cleanest channel from the most damaged channel. You do this by checking the monochrome box and then cranking up the dirty channel to 200 and bring down the clean channel to -155 or more. 3 Once you get a good mask, convert it to Grayscale (menu bar – Image, Mode, Grayscale and choose Flatten image). Save the image. 4 Open the original image again and the grayscale image. On the grayscale image, select all and copy. 5 Select the original image and add an alpha channel. Click on the alpha channel, select all and then paste the mask into the alpha channel. 6 Go back to the layers panel & click on the image layer. Go to menu bar – Select, Load Selection. Choose the alpha channel and check the invert box. 7 Next add a Curves adjustment layer and use the eye dropper to click in the photo where the tarnish is (hold Shft & Alt key down to place a point on all three channels). Adjust each channel to darken and get rid of the tarnish.

I downloaded a trial version of Affinity to see how it compares to Photoshop CC. I learned a technique for removing blue tarnish on old photos in a book by Ctein (Digital Restoration From Start To Finish - an excellent resource for those who are serious about restoring old faded and damaged photos) by exagerating color to select tarnish and create a mask to remove the tarnish. The technique involves using HSL & Channel Mixer to create a grayscale mask. When I try this technique in Affinity, I encounter a problem in Channel Mixer. In PS, the channel mixer has a monochrome check box that makes the output channel gray but keeps the RGB sliders for adjustment (see screen shot below). In Affinity when I make the output channel gray, the RGB sliders go away and are replace with 3 different sliders - intensity, alpha & offset. I played with these adjustments to get an image like the one I had in PS. I then converted the image to grayscale and saved it. In PS I then open the original image and paste the grayscale image/mask into an alpha channel. Next I do a curves adjustment to remove the tarnish and then go back to RGB to see the finished photo without the tarnish. When I tried this in Affinity, it kept pasting the grayscale image as a new layer rather than into the alpha channel. How can I paste the grayscale image into an alpha channel? Below are the original photo, the HSL adjustment to exagerate the color and the PS channel mixer adjustment.

Try the Box Blur with a radius between 4 to 6. This will eliminate most of the half-tone. After that, use other tools to enhance tonal quality, exposure, etc and heal cracks and spots..