PHOTOSHOP TUTORIAL: Photo Restoration, How to repair and restore damaged Photographs

Hello! So on this channel I restore a lot of old black-and-white photographs. Today I'm gonna be walking you through my methods of how I do so. So a picture like this can become a picture like this, let's get to it. So by default Photoshop tends to work in a very destructive way. I like to work non destructively, so the first thing I do is take my image layer and convert it to a smart object. In essence what's happened is that my original image layer has been placed inside say a clear plastic wallet. So you could write on the wallet you can you know stretch the wallet. You can do all manner of things to the wallet but the image inside is safe. The next stage for me is to crop out any edges of the photograph which I don't wish to restore. Which I do using the crop tool. Now within the crop tool as a quick thing to mention there is the straighten tool. Now in the case of this image I don't need to use it but if you were using say an image that you'd scanned in that had gone slightly skew whiff. You can click the straighten tool drag along the edge that you want to be straight and Photoshop will straighten the image based on where you've dragged that line. As I say I don't need to use that on this image but it's a good tool to use. So the crop tool understandably crops your image but again by default on the whole destructive non-destructive thing by default Photoshop leaves delete cropped pixels ticked. And that means that if you crop out an element and then you go actually I think I cropped a little bit too much and you try and undo that crop, that original information that's been cropped under these lines will be gone. So with that ticked this stuff above the line would just be gone. So we want to untick that, because then as many times as we want to we can change this crop later on. So with my crop tool in unconstrained mode I crop my image in to remove the black border that I don't want. I then crop the image. So for me an image tends to have three types of damage that all need to be repaired slightly differently. First up we have these small spots of damage. These can be fixed quite easily since they're generally surrounded by very similar pixels and you can just patch them and they're done. Then you have your more complex spot repairs such as the ones around her eye here. For these the surrounding pixels are no use for the repairs so I'll probably have to sample, for example, here from her other eye in order to fix them. Then you have your edge repairs, these tend to look a lot worse than they actually are to fix but they still require more precision than the small dot repairs to fix. Now not every healing tool in Photoshop can be used in a non-destructive way. Two that can are the Spot Healing Brush tool and the Healing Brush tool. So with these tools selected we can create a new layer and you'll notice up here it says Sample All Layers, on the Spot Healing Brush tool. So when you paint on this blank layer it will be sampling from the layer underneath as well. So if we zoom in quick here we can find a spot like this paint on it and it will look around the surrounding areas of this dark bit and fix them. And the advantage is that all these repairs are stored on this new layer. So if, say, you weren't happy with the repair you could erase it off this layer and redo it as needed. So with the general healing brush tool selected it works slightly differently if you try and paint it will tell you that you need to Alt click or on a Mac I imagine Option click to define a source point on the active layer. And this means that for example in the case of this eye we can tell it we need to find something that looks like that spot and obviously here we have another eye for that. So if you sample you now see that we have that eye selected. So you can now line that up paint in and it will fix it correctly. Now I truthfully tend to use the main Healing Brush tool more than the spot healing brush tool because you can very quickly sample a nearby spot and that way you don't have to change tools all the time. This is also very useful when you find something that's a little bit trickier to fix. So sometimes you may need to entirely replace part of the image. Let's say for example this eye were entirely missing. The best thing to do would be to replace it with the existing eye. The problem obviously is that if we were to sample this eye and then paint it in. What you would find is it looks really strange because obviously the eye isn't facing in the right direction and it's flipped the wrong way and all that kind of bad stuff. So what we could do in that circumstance is go up to window, clone source and now we can modify this image to make it look different. So for example first thing we can do is flip it. So now it's facing in the right direction. Obviously though it isn't curved enough so what we can also do is change the angle of the duplicate. So with that adjusted we now have an eye that would look correct. So now if we paint that in, it looks a lot better than it did on the previous attempt. So for me there's one area where the Healing Brush tools tend to make mistakes and that is with the edges. So say we sample here and then we try and paint out these black spots. What you'll get is a big black smudge and that is because what it's doing is sampling both from the image we can see here and from the black border that we cropped out earlier. Now of course you could have deleted that cropped border with the delete pixel area in the crop settings but the problem I find is that sometimes Photoshop will get confused and think that that area is still there even if you've told it to delete it. Therefore when I have an issue like this what I tend to do is go up to my mode on my healing brush tool and change it to replace because under normal it's trying to blend the colors but under replace it's literally taking an area and copying and pasting it. So there we go it's not as good because obviously it's not blurring the pixels together but in real terms for edges you don't tend to notice and if you change it back to normal you can go back over some of these areas and it will blend them through. Now using only the methods that I've just shown I'm gonna repair the rest of the face while you watch. So with the Healing Brush tool selected some of this is obviously fairly straightforward such as these spots here there we go. And even some like this area under the eye where you can see there's a gradual gradient aren't gonna be too tricky as long as you choose in the right spot. As you can see these tools are very good at adapting for the most part. It is all really about just finding an area that is the same brightness and then paintng that in and as with the edges they'll be the odd area where you've got really high contrast and the best thing to do is to replace those missing areas with surrounding details just sampling as you need a different piece and then if necessary go over it quickly with the tool in order to smooth it out. I actually find this process like very very therapeutic to do. Now any area such as the edges where you have these high contrast black and white differences is going to cause some problems for the healing tools. So again in those cases I tend to switch to replace mode and just replace what I need to so that the other tools can work correctly again so now I've done that you can see there's a slightly rough edge but if we switch back to normal mode I can now go over these bits a little bit and patch them. Now sometimes you have a spot like this eye where it takes you a few seconds to work out the best way to fix it. In this case the high contrast white against the others is going to mean that most of the simple patching tools won't be able to do a great job. So the first thing I'm gonna do is go to Replace mode on my Healing Brush tool here and gently and carefully replace what I can from the surrounding area. I may need to go over it again to smooth it out of it but it will allow some quick repairs which will repair most of the issues. Now I'd ideally like this edge here to be a little softer so if I switch back to normal mode and just paint in there you'll notice it softens it out and I can go back over these various bits here that look a little strange and patch them until they don't, there we go. Now using only the methods that I've shown I'm gonna go through the rest of this image. I don't think we really want this tutorial series to be like two hours long. So I'm going to go through here patch all this damage out and then we'll regroup and we'll adjust the lighting. So with the restoration done I now have two main areas and when I look at. One is the fact that there seems to be light bleeding into the left and right hand sides of this particular negative which can be seen on the original version as well and I would also like to have a little look at the general overall exposure. So firstly I'll add a curves adjustment which I can use to affect how light or dark the image is but what I'm going to do is apply a mask to it. So we can see we currently have a white mask on it which is showing through the full adjustment. I can fill that with black which then means I, well, none of it's showing through as you can see and now I can paint into the left and right hand sides or at least mask into them, in order to darken down those areas. Now with both the left and right hand sides unmasked while the middle is masked you can see I can adjust those separately but at the moment there's quite a harsh line so I'm going to apply a blur to my mask, a motion blur, just to smooth that out. So now I can adjust that far more precisely. I think i'll blur it a little bit more and I'll make a few little adjustments down the bottom for the bits that it didn't cover and a few on the right. Now looking at this I'd like to just make a little bit of an adjustment to the center because it's a bit overexposed just to see what I can bring back detail-wise. So using a curves adjustment I can just drag down a little bit in the center I don't want to do it too much and let's have a look at that before and after. There we go, I think we would say that is done maybe I'll dial that back a little bit and there we go that is restored. Thank you very much for watching if you'd like to watch a tutorial about how I go about coloring this picture I've got one on this channel along with lots of videos on various historical pictures which I've restored and colored. A Like and or Subscription would be very much appreciated as they really encourage me to keep making videos .Thanks again and bye for now!

Channel: JBColourisation

Views: 110,726

Rating: 4.9630227 out of 5

Keywords: Photo Restoration, Photoshop Tutorial, old photo restoration, restoration, photoshop, photo restoration, photo repair, photo restoration work, old photo, repair old photos, jbcolourisation, preservation - topic, preservation, restore, repair, old restoration, restoration project, rare historical photos, photoshop restoration, old photo restore, photo repair photoshop, photoshop photo fix, old photo restoration photoshop, photoshop tutorial, how to, perfect restoration

Id: FmtQJHJ17xs

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020