robertstirling Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 Hi Everyone, I am trying to restore old photos and have had some success with recolour. I currently have a family photo from around 1955 where the bottom corner is torn off and lost. I am copying and pasting sections of brickwork, peoples legs and foliage from around the background. There are huge differences in 'greyness' and I wondered if the greyscale graph from 1 section could be used in another. Any tips would be appreciated. Regards, Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotMyFault Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 Hi Rob, some basic techniques can be found in this tutorial. Regards, Timo robertstirling 1 Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotMyFault Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 In addition, i would suggest trying to get a better scan: store photo beyond a flat surface and at least 1kg weight for several days to flatten the photo scan only the actual photo size instead of A4 / letter increase scan resolution to maximum available (e.g. 1200 DPI) if possible, adjust scan settings to maximize contrast (black to white), for scan use 16 bit color depth, use tiff format (not jpeg), no compression scan may take hours and require 100 megabytes with these settings, but you can export the result as jpeg later from affinity and get much better results. if you are using an epson scanner and epson scan software, select „professional“ mode, scan a preview, and adjust curves, levels etc before starting actual scan. Do not use windows scan app or twain. robertstirling 1 Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wonderings Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 I know photos has a similar feature to Photoshop for spot healing. They are pretty incredible tools. I did this in a minute in Photoshop. Might give you a better starting off point for fixing and adjusting to make an image whole. The image is rough but can be fixed and cleaned up with time, this was very quickly done and can be done in Photos, just not sure what name they give the tool. robertstirling 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotMyFault Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 I spend 15 minutes: cropped to the picture copied various parts (flattened) and the moved / resized / adjusting brightness to match left leg to fill in right leg after rotate, adjust size & brightness rigth wall copied 2 times to fill missing part copy of black cloth to fill in lower missing part below another copy of left leg to simulate socks used masks to soften areas between patches used a pixel layer and healing brush to further soften some areas used a dust & scratch removal to hide scratches. apllied mask to anly apply to areas with scratches to avoid overall softening merged visible used photo persona and "details refinemend with 50% / 50% to improve detail & micro contrast used levels adjustment to increase overal contrast You could easily spend additional hours for fine-tuning and a more thorow process to gain better result Have fun Timo robertstirling 1 Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NotMyFault Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 old_photo.afphoto robertstirling 1 Quote Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080 LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589 Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps. My posts focus on technical aspects and leave out most of social grease like „maybe“, „in my opinion“, „I might be wrong“ etc. just add copy/paste all these softeners from this signature to make reading more comfortable for you. Otherwise I’m a fine person which respects you and everyone and wants to be respected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carl123 Posted January 28, 2021 Share Posted January 28, 2021 18 hours ago, robertstirling said: There are huge differences in 'greyness' and I wondered if the greyscale graph from 1 section could be used in another. Never heard of that before. Is that something that can be done in, say, Photoshop? * Image colourisation curtesy of DeepAi robertstirling 1 Quote To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaffeeundsalz Posted January 28, 2021 Share Posted January 28, 2021 What the OP probably means is that brightness/contrast and tint of an image area doesn't necessarly match the area that it's cloned to. One could try to play around with the patch tool which sometimes does a pretty good job at blending areas of different appearance. Personally, I end up using manual corrections with nested Curves layers most of the time. robertstirling 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robertstirling Posted February 4, 2021 Author Share Posted February 4, 2021 (edited) Thanks everyone for your help. Lots of great suggestions and a final version to work towards to compare and contrast. (I, apparently, haven't got the latest version so it won't download - next job.... ) Not download but open in Affinity... Best regards Rob Edited February 4, 2021 by robertstirling wrong word used (download instead of 'open in Affinity') Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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