Any hint howto get rid of water stains on photo?

[pixupdate]

Hi,

could anyone please recommend me a way how I get rid of the water stains on this photo? I thought of seperating the colour-chanels first, but this did not lead to apropper sollution. Especially the area around the eyes seems to be complicated.

Thanks für any hints,

Georg

 

[stokerg]

Hi pixupdate,

I'd suggest starting with some of the Healing tools, clone tool, inpainting and healing brush.  It's going to be tricky as it looks a very badly damaged image and the repairing parts of the image, like the eye or hair will be hard as there doesn't appear to be any good area to clone from.   

I'm sure if anyone else has some tips, they will post them  

[pixupdate]

Thanks for your answer. So it is as complicated as I thought. Maybe it would be a great feature to implement a mode: "Source colour only" to the patch tool? So for example I would be able to transfer the colour of the pullover to the damaged areas without changing their gray values.

[toltec]

4 hours ago, pixupdate said:

 So it is as complicated as I thought. 

Not complicated, but a bit time consuming. You could do most of it with the Clone Tool

It will be much easier if there is a good side under all that black to clone from.

Would have like to put some texture in the jumper, but couldn't find anything suitable. Probably hidden under the black.

[firstdefence]

Its hard to work out a solution with all of that black. You might be able to select the magenta streaks and get close to the skin colour with a Colour Balance adjustment, inpainting can solves some of the issues and the same with cloning.

[carl123]

Still a lot of purple on the face but the blacked out areas makes it too restrictive to want to spend more time on it.

No magic one-off technique, had to use different things on different areas, such as...

HSL adjustments
Cloning
InPainting
Add noise
Blurring
Dodge & Burn
Painting
Masking
Defringe
etc

 

[firstdefence]

The magenta you have to do in stages, if you do it en-masse the lighter portions turn yellow, I was doing a colour balance to start with on the magenta marks, before you start to change the colour of the jumper in the magenta areas I used the inpainting to soften the hard edges of the magenta on the jumper, I wanted to minimise the the work here as much as possible, I also used the healing brush to get rid of the white flecks so they didn't repeat if cloned.

[pixupdate]

It's great to get so much support. Thanks a lot! I'm sorry for the black on the image, but I got to keep the privacy of "Mr x".
If I have a look at the suggested methods I'd prefer the filtering because cloning and paintig changes the content. Cloning and inpainting might be ok for cars, landscapes etc. But I'm not sure if this ist the right way for a face. Nevertheless your results are astonishing and  impressive!
My efforts have not yet come to an end (and probably I also would have to use a mix of all methods). I'll  post my result a.s.a.p.

 

 

[firstdefence]

7 hours ago, pixupdate said:

I'd prefer the filtering because cloning and paintig changes the content.

You can actually do none destructive cloning by creating a pixel layer above the original and with the clone tool selected choose Layer Beneath in the context menu above the workspace, any cloning will be placed on the new pixel layer and will not touch the original image.

The same goes for Inpainting, Spot Healing, Patching and colour replacement, the latter would be a good tool to use after blurring the water marked edges to soften the transition.

[pixupdate]

Well altough you work on another layer "cloning" is "copying" pixels from a similar looking region to another. This changes the microstructure for example of the skin. The result could be great looking but it is not authentic in its microdetails.

[pixupdate]

So this is my result. To get the structure of the jumper I worked with the cmyk-chanels one by one and partly copied them into eachother.