jmwellborn

Bienvenue sur les Forums Chrys!

@Alfred Added the very latest image to the post above.

Back to the drawing boards. I'm trying to give the spooky eyed-man a shadow under his cap, rather like some of the others, without turning him into a garden mole. Another try.

Well, here goes again. @Alfred and @joe_l what do you think of these eyes and lips? Still too spooky and too light? To quote my late father: "We strive to please!"🤔 Actually, thank you for your suggestions!!

Absolutely. “Practice makes perfect”. — or in my case “makes positive steps, hopefully.”

@MmmMaarten These two seem to be having a wonderful time. I think perhaps I like them best, although it is really hard to decide.

@joe_l Here is my latest attempt, using the Baseten converter, thanks to you, and starting all over again, with much inpainting, patching, cloning, and mumbling. I used @smadell's very kind instructions — especially regarding Frequency Separation — and a gentle sharpening at the end. The reason for this is that the person who sent me the image wants to use it for Christmas cards. After some printing tries and errors, I find that the extra detail will probably carry over better on printed media. At least I think so at this moment. This time I even have all the buttons on the coats, and a pair of eyes (borrowed) for the gentleman on the very left. No matter what, I hope it is a far cry from the original grim post. Thank you everybody who have helped so much!!

I deleted that post because I couldn’t make an edit to it, even though I used the proper procedure ( to wit: clicking on …) I have just looked this company up on the Web. They are offering this service free of charge — at least for the present. The company appears to be completely legitimate, as well. One loads an image onto their interactive website, gets a corrected image, which can then be downloaded. I tried a rather dim screenshot unrelated to the picture in this topic and it came back quite nicely enhanced. I was then able to easily download the image to my iPad (working from it at present). So I think neither of us is a villain! Thank you very much for the information!

Are you offering this to @smadell or to me? Or to us both? Any input is most gratefully accepted. This is definitely a learning experience!!

@MmmMaarten Going to look at them closely on my 24” screen. So many are so delightful. Report later.

Charming! Looks like a lot of fun, too.

"Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. . . . ." Good advice, but I didn't take it. With zero artistic ability, a tremor in my left hand (my writing hand) and a mouse that I use with my right hand, I thought it would be fun to experiment. I started in Photo with my image of the lions. Then used the Selection Brush tool to remove them from their original background. Then added a rectangle, filled with a background colour, which I placed underneath the lion selection layer. Then created several new pixel layers (one at a time, as I fiddled with new paint colours and brushes) and used several shading brushes (and really went wild with the Smudge Brush Tool). I flipped back and forth between Photo and Designer to try to make some convincing grass with some vector brushes. Major flop! Back to Photo to make a selection of the heads of the two lions, which I placed on top of the entire thing in order to try to make them peer out of the fog. Anyway, with a dolt like me messing around and achieving this very amateurish result, just think what you @Digbydo 2 can do!! As long as you keep putting stuff on individual layers, so you can quickly change or replace something, you should be on your way!

@Kasper-V Magical!! I especially like the first one.

Here goes. With an enormous of amount of help from @smadell, who patiently and very kindly led me through a number of things (most importantly, Frequency Separations, which I had never understood) here is another stab at the picture. I agree with him that some softness is more appealing with a very old picture. I also appreciate so much @v_kyr's suggestion about lightening the faces! In the process, I have given the chap (third from the right) a better ear, sorted the chin for one chap (third from the left) and gave the fellow on the far left one eye, because he looked rather blank. Not the best matching eye, but I tell myself he is squinting against the sun! I tried his right eye, but failed miserably. I tried working from scratch with the image that @RichardMH very kindly posted, but found that in the end, after all of that inpainting, there was an infinitesimal difference between using the original image and the enhanced image using Topaz Gigapixel. Thank you everyone for all of your help. It is very much appreciated!!

@RichardMH Remarkable! Unfortunately $99.99 may be a bit steep for volunteering to try to fix one image. But with a fresh and spiffed up image to fiddle with, who knows? I may be tempted, after all. Thank you!

@dannyg9 Yes, my particular Clone tool definitely doesn't think much of me. On the other hand, the Patch tool has decided to be tolerant and to give me another try! And you are right — walking away is definitely part of the scheme. After an hour or so of nose-to-the-24"-screen inpainting (why does spell-check insist on changing inpainting to pinpointing?) tiny little dots do interfere with the joie de vivre. One tends to reach a point where one thinks Oh, fine! "Good enough for Government Work." (Except that I don't work for any government.)

Got it! Thank you so much!!

@smadell I think your version is so much better than mine. On a retina screen things can get really overdone and I overdid it. I would be really grateful for your . afphoto file, so I can see exactly what you did. Homework!!!!!!

Agree. Tried this. another grandfather.tiff

After and before screenshot from a .TIFF scan sent to me from a photo dated 1917. Made a B&W adjustment, much Inpainting. Used the Patch Tool for a missing ear, missing shoe, part of a missing chin, and a coat button. Dodge Tool eliminated much dark stuff in the background and on the white rectangle at the right of the image. Burn Tool darkened some parts of the uniforms so they didn't look dusty. Merge Visible with a Blend Mode of Colour (I think, unfortunately didn't write it down), to turn the still grungy greyish stuff to almost white. Exported as a .TIFF. Placed the new .TIFF as a new document. Then I used the JR Sharpening macro, Enhance Depth and Contrast, repeated that macro. Then made a Brightness/Contrast Adjustment. Much more Inpainting to get rid of about 75-100 tiny white specs of about 1-2 px each which were still on the dark uniforms. Then used the JR macro, Edge Detect Sharpening. Merge Visible. Export as a new .TIFF. Suggestions to improve this?

Delightful. And extraordinary! It takes two or three replays to absorb all of the moving details. Especially like the duck.

@Glady77 Hopefully after you have used the Affinity apps for a little while you will discover not only how very customer-oriented they are but also how customer-oriented the people at Serif are. And how extremely helpful the members of this forum are to each other. It is a far distant cry from the we-could-care-less-just-send-us-your-monthly-payment-to-rent-your-own-creative-products approach. You are obviously disappointed with Apple. But Serif doesn’t determine Apple’s business model.

@Kasper-V The "hobbit" looks like my long-ago Physics professor, who — his suit smeared with yellow chalk — made one hour of one high school year a living H***. I'll take the "ralf" any day of the week! He looks like a rather friendly chap.

Eeeeek!!! They mean business!

@Jochum Berg Welcome to the Forums! 😊 What nice “baby steps!” As you become more and more familiar with the lovely Affinity apps I am sure you will find them more and more fun to use!