How to Repair an Old Torn Photo in Photoshop

today I'm going to show you how to repair an old torn up photo in Photoshop hey guys and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE and you can find me on phlearn calm roll we make learning photoshop & photography fun and today's episode was brought to you by my good friend and photographer edy Fraser and he sent me this image it's actually of his father taken back in the days of film and so it's a scan of a physical image the problem is the image over time it's gotten torn up there are a lot of blemishes there's some discoloration and today we're going to bring all that together and show you how to fix an old torn up photo we're going to show you how to take different pieces of a torn up photo and bring those back together in Photoshop as well then we're going to show you guys how to actually fix the blemishes in the photo we're going to show you guys how to use the Spot Healing Brush the clone stamp tool as well as the brush tool to get rid of all those blemishes we're going to show you how to use some selective color to take care of some discoloration issues in the photo and by the end of today's episode we're going to take this piece together photo and bring it back to its original life all right so here's our photo that we're working with today and as you can see damage has seen better days so to start with basically what I need to do is I need to figure out how to get each one of these paste pieces right now they're all on the same layer I need to get them all on different layers so I can actually start moving them around and placing them back together so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a selection out of my background so we're going to grab our magic wand tool in a w-4 the magic wand tool and then I'm just going to click right here on my background because it's completely white and that's going to really allow me to make a nice selection out of the background which I'm going to then in turn use to cut everything out now let's see based on the tolerance right up here is going to choose how much or how little we're actually going to select of the image and this looks pretty good this is it's not a perfect selection right around the image but we've got so much repair work that needs to be done we're looking pretty good to start with now the next thing we're going to do let's zoom in I'm going to hit refine edge right up here because we're going to go ahead and bring this edge in just a little bit so let's hit refine edge there we can see a really nice example of what we're actually working with in our image so we're going to bring up feathering just a little bit there we go and I'm actually going to shift the edge we're going to shift it in towards the center of the image a little bit more there we go that's going to look good and it's going to take care of some of the shadows and other areas around the and just allow us to cut it everything out and place them back together a little bit better all right so let's sit okay and there we have it we have three selections now well basically one selection for our three so what we're going to do is I'm actually going to inverse this selection so I'm going to go to select and then down to inverse and now what you can see is instead of selecting the white it's actually got different colors or the different pieces selected so here my background layer we're going to hit ctrl or command J and that's going to duplicate those pieces onto a new layer so controller command J and there we have a new layer and we should have a clear blank background which is exactly what we want okay now let's go ahead and start working with these pieces because I need each of these to be on their own layer as well so what we're going to do is grab my lasso tool and make a selection right around each one of the pieces there we go we got a selection around that one now I'm on this layer where the where the actual piece is we're gonna hit command or control X which is cut and then we're going to hit shift command V which is place or paste right back into place but it's going to be on a new layer so we're basically just doing a cut and paste here so now instead of this being on this layer it's on its own layer we're going to do this again so you can see all right so let's take this bottom piece here we're going to make a selection right around it there we go super simple with my lasso tool okay on this same layer that you just want to make sure turn it off and on to make sure it's on that layer we're gonna hit command X to cut it out and then shift command V is going to place it right back on to a new layer okay cool so we're looking pretty good now let's go ahead and start moving these things in place and actually start lining some things up so we'll take our layer three here okay and use my move tool so I'm gonna hit V for the move tool and then I can just start moving this around now I'm not so much playing at paying attention to the Terr what I want to pay attention to or the areas in my photo where I can actually see things line up like anything that's geometry that where I can kind of see like you know obviously like this is a big machine right so this line should continue on to that line so as I move these things up I can kind of use what's actually in the photo to define where the two images should go so you can also if you need to move them you if you need to move the images you can use the up down left and right keys on your keyboard there we go so I'm kind of looking at this you know is like a continuation of that line there and then a continuation of this line as well and if I get that right everything else should continue including our subjects face and everything like that so you can see we have a lot of area that's just kind of like just a big giant tear so we're gonna have to do a lot of work to repair that tear and make it look right but so far we're looking pretty good with getting everything in place okay now this layer should be relatively easy as well just take this corner here and let's see we'll go ahead and place it let's just zoom in there we go and I'm going to align the border there on the top and the border on the right in this case I'm going to just we're going to rotate this a little bit so I'm gonna hit command T and we're just going to rotate this around just a little bit there we go and then I'm going to use my arrow keys on my keyboard to just kind of nudge that in place all right there we go and that looks pretty good so you can see because we have a tear right some of these areas overlap so like this we can see there's white area here right at the end of this image but this is actually the underside of the image so what we're going to do is I'm going to actually move this layer down so let's click and drag this down and there we go now we can see we actually have some of the information from the layer above it and let's see that looks pretty good too so there's a lot of area I mean when a photo was torn up and stuff like this there's a lot of areas that are just completely missing and we've got you know what looks like you know maybe some dirt and stuff like that on the image as well as basically like a piece of scotch tape that someone had used this was pre Photoshop this is a Photoshop version 1.0 scotch tape basically to paste everything together alright now let's go ahead you know what under these layers I'm going to create a solid color adjustment layer and we're just going to go straight to white so I can I can just put something under them so I can actually see what I'm doing alright so what we've got here let's go ahead and group these two layers together we're just going to call this background all right and now we have three individual layers so we've got our layer on our Left we've got our top layer and our right layer and everything is lined up really nicely so the first part of the image is done now let's move into actually repairing all these tears and blemishes and color discolorations color discolorations on this image in this section we're going to show you guys how to use a Spot Healing Brush tool the clone stamp tool as well as the brush tool to actually bring these images back together so let's start with our Spot Healing Brush tool now the Spot Healing Brush tool we're going to create a new layer for this so let's just create a new layer and we're going to go right over here to where we see our Spot Healing Brush tool now this is an awesome tool anytime you have a blemish that's basically something like this a blemish that doesn't have a whole lot right around it and the Spot Healing Brush tool we want to make sure we have content-aware right there and we want to make sure we have sample all layers as well and we are on a new layer so anytime I have a little blemish like that I can basically just use this tool paint right over it and it's going to completely disappear it samples another area of my photo and replaces it with that area so anything that we have that's like a little blemish like that we can just completely repair with the Spot Healing Brush tool now a lot of this work is not going to be is not Spot Healing Brush tool worthy because it's just too complex you'll see if I do try to cover this area here it may do an okay job but we're going to have to keep painting and painting and painting so this is actually not doing too bad of a job these little blemishes and scratches and stuff like that Spot Healing Brush tool it's so quick and easy that I would really recommend starting out with this tool because you can do quite a bit of your image with just this one tool there's no sampling involved you just literally paint right every what you want now moving to our subject if we were to try to use this it's not really going to work that well because we have some we have basically not a whole lot of detail to pull from here and there's a lot of intricate detail that's needed in my image like something like that it's not going to do the best job so let's move on to our next tool which is our clone stamp tool gives you a little bit more control so we're going to create a new layer and now let's hit s for the clone stamp tool now the reason I like the clone stamp tool is because you can sample exactly where you want the Spot Healing Brush tool is going to sample an area on its own and then it's going to try to blend things together the clone stamp tool is just going to give you an exact duplicate of wherever you sample so you're going to get a lot more control with the clone stamp tool so let's try this here I'm going to hit s4 the clone stamp tool and we're going to just sample this area right over here so sample right up there and then we're going to paint in right down below and I can very accurately just get rid of this line if I want to and you can zoom in really close and take care of all the small details and blemishes that you want so anywhere that requires quite a bit of detail work that's where I'm going to be relying on my clone stamp tool now I'm going to use the same thing we're going to just cover right over this tear so I'm going to sample this area we're going to cover right over that tear there we go including all this blemish work using our clone stamp tool now when you do use the clone stamp tool you are going to get some areas that duplicate like you know if you have a little a little spot or something like that it's probably going to duplicate over and over again so just be sure to look out for those duplicated areas I'll show you what I mean like if if we have like that little area right there if I clone stamp that we're going to get you know now three of those things that look exactly like that so just keep an eye out for that sort of thing you can just clone stamp right over those areas if you do have duplicates okay here we go and we're taking care of this scratch as well now my next big tip when using the clone stamp tool let's just zoom even more this is going to help with the fine detail work you can choose your sample point so we're going to hold alt or option now if I want to see a preview of what I'm actually going to do we can go to window and then down here to clone source okay so this clone source dialog is really cool because we can actually turn this option on this as show overlay so if I click show overlay on what it's going to do now is it's going to actually show me what I'm going to be painting so if I have to paint over this area where I've got this you know I've got a continuation of a shadow line here I can't I can't be painting over here or over here because it won't look right so what I'm going to do is sample here I've got show overlay checked on and now it gives me a really nice overlay of what it's actually gonna look like so when I click and start painting over it it's there's no guesswork involved I know exactly what I'm going to be putting down and I can place things exactly where I need and it's just going to make my job a lot faster when I'm working with the clone stamp tool because I know exactly what it's going to look like after I've already placed the tool there's no guesswork involved after that all right so we're going to sample right there we're going to paint this in and there you know there's a good example where that doesn't look natural right so let's sample down here and we're going to just paint this in and fix that up really nicely so this is basically the technique we're going to take with the majority of the photo basically taking all these little areas like this that's a great example too we're in a sample right here and see what it would look like as I paint over and don't be afraid to sample a lot of times what I'm doing here is sampling you know over and over again and I'm just painting in to replace those parts like here I'm basically painting that that line straight up there and using this show overlay to be able to see what I'm doing beforehand all right so let me just finish this up real quick and then we're going to show you guys what the brush tool looks like there we go and we're going to go all the way to the edge of our subject here you can make your brush large or small depending if you're working on a small area I would recommend using a small brush it's going to help you stay more precise working on a large area you're going to want to use a large brush because it's going to allow you to work a little bit faster there we go that's really nice okay now we're going to show you the third technique and this is using the brush tool now the reason you would want to use the brush tool this is going to be your last resort is if you don't really have another option if there's not really anything to sample from so the Spot Healing Brush is when you have a lot to sample from clone stamp is when you have a little bit less to sample from and using the brush tool it really means you don't have a lot to sample from at all so we'll show you when you actually want to use that for instance let's create a new layer here and we're going to hit B for the brush tool now here's how you can use the brush tool basically what we're going to be doing here is I'm going to be sampling a color just by holding alt or option that samples a color and then I'm going to be painting with the brush tool so this is basically when you don't have like that this is a case where I need to define the zoom out a little bit there I needed to find the basically where his chin is right but it's there's a giant tear there and then this area the color is all weird and there's just there's not a lot that I can work with here so I need to paint it in by hand and that's what we're doing with the brush tool so what we're going to do is I'm going to sample these colors here they're actually you know in what I would call the the good color range and I'm just basically have to paint in a new chin so this is where you can you can get to be a little bit creative and see how your your painting skills line up all right there we go now I definitely say that the Brussels is a last resort you don't want to start using this tool unless you need to because it's going to be the hardest of all but sometimes you really just don't have an option all right there we go so I'm painting in kind of like the base colors here and then we're going to go back in just a second and I'm going to add some more detail all right and if you do a good job of it it should look like the original photo all right and in this case we're pretty lucky because the original photo is relatively low resolution I would not recommend grabbing a brush tool and painting someone's face unlike a you know 20 megapixel image because you'll be able to tell alright so now I needed to find the best basically define the bottom of his chin or like a chin line so what I'm going to choose is a dark color that's actually in my photo and we're going to start painting this in as well I am using a Wacom tablet here which is a lot like you know using a paintbrush which definitely makes things a lot easier and if you're concerned with like how much you're actually going to be putting down as far as like how much ink is going to actually go on to your image you can change your flow here so using a lower flow will allow you to build your coloring up which will allow you to create transitions that look a lot more natural now I'm doing this relatively quickly if this were you know client work I would be spending a bit more time on this but for the tutorial this is about what we're going to be doing with our brush tool so if we zoom out there I mean I kind of had to reconstruct his face a little bit but it's much better than our original there we go let's get some more shading in here we could even give him here we go really high masculine cheekbones look at that we're not going to play around with this too much but really cool way where you can actually reconstruct and then again this is when you really don't have any other options and if you did want to add some texture in over top of that we're going to show you how to do that as well basically all you would need to do is create something like a noise filter so if I created a new layer and let's make a selection right around this layer I'm going to fill this shift delete with 50% gray we're going to go to filter noise add noise okay and basically what I'm just doing let's just add a little bit less there we go we're going to change this layer from normal down to soft light I'm just giving this a little bit of texture it may be hard to see here on on the video make sure your quality is set up too high we're just adding a little bit of texture over top of there and then I could just layer mask this in and put this basically right right overtop of wherever I paint and it's going to give it a little bit of texture which makes it look more like it was in a photo and less like I just painted it on with with the brush tool so that's just a little key if you are going to be using the brush tool to kind of get rid of everything or to repair these areas of your photo so these are the principles we're going to be using the Spot Healing Brush tool as well as a clone stamp tool and the brush tool to repair this image so these are not really hard things to do but they do take a while so what I'm going to do now we're going to speed the film up a little bit I'm going to go ahead and complete the rest of this image you guys can watch me in a little bit more of a fast-forward and then we're going to come back afterwards and show you guys how to repair some of the colors in the image alright so here we are starting off with the clone stamp tool and we're gonna be working around the borders and edges taking care of small blemishes and areas things like that I'm working on the non-technical parts first that the not difficult parts so I can kind of get used to photoshop and that way by the time I get to the I'm a little bit more like a tuned into what I'm actually doing so we're just making selections and painting it in and really just trying to do the most simple job I can when it comes to repairing this so starting around the the frame here we're basically just clone stamping from one area over to another one and this is really about as simple as it get is using using one area to cover the other one with the image frame all right and here we can see switching back and forth to the Spot Healing Brush as well so going up to the clone stamp here sampling from the right and painting left right over there to cover that spot and then for this part I'm actually just grabbing the brush tool and sampling a color that works well and kind of blending that together because I didn't have a lot to actually sample all right going back to the clone stamp tool this is an area you know I'm just using every little bit of information I possibly can't happen you know nothing's gonna blend in perfectly but I you know the image is going to look like an old photograph no matter what I do so I'm going to keep that a little bit of mine while I'm actually blending these things in so we're gonna try to sample his hair and kind of paint that in a little bit get rid of some of these more blemishes but you can see for the most part I'm staying away from his face or anything that's you know relatively difficult to do around his neck area right now I was painting with the brush tool just to make it a little easier and this is all with the brush tool as well because I don't have really any areas to actually sample with so the clone stamp tool is not really going to work that well on his face all right there we go then zooming out we're basically getting take care of some excess machinery here and just kind of you know getting these things kind of roughed in and this is going to take as long as little bit as you'd like you could spend days and days on this or you can try to get it done like I did in about 20 minutes so kind of repairing everything now this is basically just using a brush tool here sampling colors and painting in because there was really no information to use with something like a clone stamp tool it was so badly degraded that really the only option I had was a brush tool so I'm lucky that object is not very complex all right and we're clone stamping and then there on the bottom of the image we're just going to leave that kind of be make it look like it's in an old photo no big deal and there we go done with the retouching and that wraps up the retouching part of this image it took about 20 minutes in real time but it made a huge difference in the final image looks again the before this is without any retouching at all and here's the after you can see it made a huge difference that's a little spot in the corner but that gives it a little bit of authenticity there now let's take a look at what we can do with actually changing the colors in this image to get rid of some of this color cast you can see here on the top part of this image we do have like a bit of a yellow color cast in our image and that's going to happen anytime you have like an old aged photo they tend to just kind of like change colors and things like that so what I'm going to do we're going to grab an adjustment layer we're going to go all the way down here the very bottom to where it says selective color so I really like the selective color adjustment layer because we can choose the exact color we want and we can adjust it either more or less cyan magenta yellow or black so the first color I really want to choose is my yellows because we do have like this yellow color cast that's pretty much over the entire image or at least at least the like top part of it so what we're going to do we're going to change this for the colors we're going to go down to yellows and then just to see what it's actually being affected usually I'll take a couple of these sliders and just push them left and right to see how it actually affects my image let's just zoom in so we can act we can see the yellows in effect there all right so we can take our yellows and I'm just going to bring less yellow so we could see if I were to bring more yellow this is what we get it's kind of making the problem a bit worse and here bringing less yellow really does help that problem out there we go we can give it either more or less magenta there we go that looked pretty good right there at 0 and then we can give it a little bit of cyan or a little bit less all right let's push it a little bit in cyan is a cool color so it's going to make the image just a little bit cooler alright that's looking pretty good let's just turn this off and on to me so we can see the actual difference that makes with the color cast it's really nice because it actually helps our subjects skin as well alright now if there are any other colors let's go ahead and see what our Reds look like because we do have some Reds in the subject skin as well as what's going on here if we bring in less cyan or more cyan how does that look well this doesn't really help our problem well but adding some cyan actually does help out quite a bit let's look at our Reds now as well and we it really does a nice job removing a color cast there too so we can see about pulling the yellows down but in this case it adds a little bit too much purple into the image pulling these up just a little bit I think works out pretty well all right so that's looking pretty good we do have let's see what we've got with our magentas down here as well we can pull our scions down and then push them back up and we can see that this is the area that's kind of showing up magenta we can see just by adjusting these sliders basically looking at at our image there we go and maybe we will push a little bit more yellow into those magentas as well so let's take a look right down here on this image and we can see there's the before it really does have that like really magenta kind of purple color cast there and turning this back on we can see it pretty much gets rid of that okay now the last thing I want to do is change this from magenta to our whites and what we want to do is we do have still a lot of yellow in the light colors you can see it around the border so what we're going to do is in the whites we're just going to take this yellow down and that's going to really help to cool our image down we don't want to go too far it's going to kind of start to look blue but bringing this down a little bit you can see if we were to push it up and make the whites a lot more yellow down really helps out look a lot better all right and then let's play with our blacks just a little bit we can make these a little bit darker if we want it's going to add some contrast or make them a little bit lighter I think a little bit darker in this case actually works to our benefit all right let's go ahead and close that out and we can see what this image looks like before and the after the color correction so here's the for color correction you can see it's just all over the place and after the color correction it really does look quite a bit better now if you did want to add any more color to the image let's say we've got a you know a yellow shirt and we want to just make it a little bit more yellow you can use either a hue/saturation adjustment layer or kerbs let's try a hue/saturation adjustment layer I'm going to bring up my saturation just a little bit there we go that looks good on the shirt it doesn't look good everywhere so let's go ahead and close this down I'm gonna hit command-i on my layer mask and now we can just paint this visible right where our shirt is to bring some of that Ridge no color backed or shirt because the image as a whole did have a bit of a color cast to it there we go and we didn't want it to be visible over the whole image but in some areas we do want to bring a little bit more color just so we can actually add some life back to the photo and it doesn't look so monochromatic alright so let's go ahead and group those together there we go here is our color and that finishes up our image really really cool all right so let's take a look at our original this is our background here we go we started out with basically just everything completely cut apart and needing a lot of retouching then we brought the images together and you can see we brought them each on different layers so we've got let's just make that visible there so we've got this layer here making up the left side the right side and then the bottom and then retouching those layers takes away all of those blemishes really really great and then we're bringing back the color adjustments to make it look a lot more like it did probably about 20 or 30 years ago awesome awesome image that's the end of today's episode guys thank you so much for watching if you got any images that are sitting around in an old photo album getting all dusty and torn up and turning yellow scan them into your computer and use these techniques to bring them back to life remember how we showed you to actually cut out each of the individual pieces and then place them back together using clues from the original image as to where the individual pieces are going to go then we showed you guys how to use retouching tools such as the Spot Healing Brush tool the clone stamp tool and the regular brush tool to get rid of all the blemishes and even fix tears and then we showed you guys how to change the colors getting rid of those color casts and bring new life back to the photos if you guys love photoshop in photography just like I do hit subscribe on your screen right now we'll send you free photoshop & photography episodes every single week and if you have an idea for a new episode or a question about today's episode leave it in a comment down below we'll do our best to answer those questions and as always share fun with your friends because nothing is better than sharing thanks guys i'll phlearn you later bye everyone boom boom boom boom boom pop boom boom boom boom alright guys and that's it for today's and that's alright guys and that's it for today's episode I really help this up I hope it helps out cool if you love Photoshop in photography oh that's just my mouth off Oh alright guys that's the end of todays you

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 223,865

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, torn photo, fix aged photo, piece photo together, fix blemishes, Pic, Adobe Photoshop (Software), Photograph (Media Genre), Tricks, rip, tear in photo, clone stamp tool, spot healing brush, spot healing tool, brush tool, vintage, vintage photo, film, film camera, film photograph

Id: abXAvWuteI4

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 22 2015