Ramblings of a Grouch

Hair done*

Just a few final steps before this DigitalMemoriesonline project is finished. The hair in this photograph is in fairly good condition - a few black spots, a couple of light patches and several light scratches running top right to bottom left. There were also a few blemishes in the background near the hair which I left until this stage to ensure accurate restoration.

In the areas where there is little detail I used the Patch tool. Areas containing detail and texture required the Clone tool, while the scratches were dealt with at high magnification with the Clone tool, this time using a soft brush to eliminate hard edges in the repaired areas. Attention has to be paid to light, shade and texture when dealing with the hair.

This completed the restoration part of the project, but I was not quite finished. The image as a whole was still a little washed out and lacked 'punch' - low contrast and soft edges.

There are many ways of addressing these problems - I considered using a Levels adjustment to increase the contrast, followed by sharpening the whole image. However, I decided to copy the image, apply a High Pass filter. This filter enhances the edges of the image and increases the contrast of the tones without introducing unwanted effects such as fringing or taking the whites and blacks too far. The result is quite frightening as, on its own, this adjustment is way over the top for our purposes. But by combining the new layer with the original image , dropping the opacity of the new layer and erasing the lower half of the image, I achieved a pleasing balance.

So we are now ready to attack the final stages - sepia toning and adding a border.

Until next time ...

*Note that this article appears out of place as it disappeared one day and had to be restored some months later.

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