Retouching an old T-Shirt print

[afx]

Hi,

usually I don't need much of the power of a full blown image editor, Capture One is all I need for my photos.

But occasionally I need more, then I turn to Affinity Photo and fumble through, don't use it often enough to really become proficient.

 

Now I started a project where I am at wits end. I have an old T-Shirt with a faded and heavily cracked print. see attached sample.

Can not buy a new one, they where one off from 20 years ago and a place I can no longer visit. So I need to copy the drawing to a new custom T-Shirt.

 

I manged to generate a PNG with only the drawing and no background.

 

Now the question becomes, how to I regenerate the colored areas without the cracks?

 

Pointers on how to solve this are very much appreciated.

 

thx

afx

[jhoy]

Hi afx

 

You can improve this picture using the inpainting brush and the clone brush to help remove and blend in the cracks, I have put two links below to the relevant tutorials.

 

 https://vimeo.com/130967587

 

https://vimeo.com/130966523

[afx]

Thanks jhoy,

but I don't see how that can work.

Cloning would have to come from a 4mm² spot to a much larger area to get over the cracks, that does not sound efficient.

Inpainting would probably need to trace all cracks, a job for ages.The sample I posted covers about 3cm² on screen at 100%, the total image is about 3000px².

 

I was thinking about defining masks based on colors (with soft enough borders to cover the cracks and then make sure the areas are filled from a dropper.

 

thx

afx

[jhoy]

Hi afx

 

I used the clone and inpainting on the attached sample but you are correct this would take ages, your suggestion may work better.

[afx]

So for me the question is, how can I quickly define masks/layers based on color boundaries?

I have black, red and blue, with black being like lines through the rest. Because of the cracks, I don't have continuous areas, so the selection needs to be loose or I end up redrawing everything.

 

thx

afx

[jhoy]

Hi afx

 

I have looked at this and I an not sure how this will effect the whole picture as I only have a small sample, could you try the following.

 

Use the colour picker to select the colour, select the selection brush tool and select a colored cracked part of the image,  now select layer, new fill layer, you will get a flat image as such you may wish to play with the transparency or select small parts of the image and select different coloured parts to make it less flat.