Restoring images with Photoshop 7

Written by Mark Webster | 01 July 2002
Posted in How To...

NZ Macguide Issue 4

Photoshop has been used for years to restore images, but with two of its most exciting new tools, the Healing Brush Tool and the Patch Tool, its more capable than ever. We found a challenging image to run Photoshop 7 through its paces, scanning it to 300% at 300dpi.

The prognosis
A family picture taken in 1947 - it's been in the bottom of a drawer for decades and shows all the signs of a hard life: stains, yellowing, fading, tears, folding, fingerprints - and besides all that, it's tiny at only six centimetres high.

Once scanned, the first step is decide whether to keep the image colour, with a kind of sepia look, or whether to make it black and white.

To change the mode, you can choose Image>Mode and select Greyscale, which discards all colours and arbitrarily flattens the image to shades of grey.

To manage the shift to grey yourself, select Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer and check the Monochrome option.

Channel Mixer lets you directly assign which colour attribute shifts to which shade of grey, giving you far more control. Here's an example used on an image converted to the CMYK colour space; these settings have allowed me to get more contrast and more definition in dark items like the battle dress jacket.

Off colour
However, I'm choosing to leave my scan as RGB (colour defined by red, green and blue and how they mix). Ill restore it, but it will have a sepia tone.

Previously, before Photoshop 7 came along, I'd painstakingly work over the image with a small brush using the stamp tool. The beauty of 7 is that the Healing Brush almost miraculously preserves textures, remapping the pixels you've moved to take on the characteristics of those beneath, so that reconstruction can take place using a little less care and bigger brushes in areas like walls or vegetation.

First I'll straighten the picture up perfectly using my all time favourite Photoshop trick (it works in 5 and 6, too): select the Measure tool from the menu that pops out when you click and hold on the eyedropper palette. Click and drag along the axis which is not four-square with the measure tool, thenU choose Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary... from the Image menu. The angle calculated by the Measure tool has been automatically input into the angle field: click OK and the image jumps to square.

Heal me
OK, the image is straight. Now the hard work begins, so Save As with a new name and you'll have the original as a fallback if anything goes horribly wrong. The Healing Tool is a sophisticated version of the Stamp cloning tool and you use it in a similar way. Choose a suitable brush type and size - a slightly soft edged, small works best (you may find it preferable, as I do, to have selected Brush Size in Preferences>Display and Cursors).

Holding down the Option key, select a point which will give you a good surface match to an area you wish to fix. You'll notice the cursor changes shape to let you know you have the Option key held down for sampling. Click with the mouse, release the option key and cautiously paint over the scratch.

I learnt to retouch real photographs with a tiny brush and ink from expert Egil Moen; the techniques remain the same in Photoshop. Use a combination of short strokes and dabs - never long, involved strokes.

Just after you let go of a stroke or dab, you'll see the brilliance of the Healing Tool work as the pixels rearrange themselves to become textured and take on other suitable attributes.

The Patch Too is much better than the Stamp for fixing large areas whenever there are similar large areas to draw from.

"Almost miraculously, the damaged bit becomes perfect."

The Healing Tool is specifically for textured areas and you'll find the straight Stamp Tool better for fixing small, flat-toned areas (the Healing Tool tends to lighten or darken flat areas). Use Stamp the same way as described above, with Option key sampling. Using a small brush with the Stamp and zooming right in is also definitely preferable to the healing brush for working on faces unless they are really big in the image. Another excellent new tool is Patch.

This boggles my mind a little, I have to admit. Patch is much better than the Stamp for fixing large areas whenever there are similar large areas to draw from. To use Patch, select a damaged area then move it to the good area you have chose. Almost miraculously, the damaged bit becomes perfect. This is excellent for shots with blemishes in larger tracts of sky or other large, flattish areas.

The cure
I find it best to zoom in to a corner and start working methodically.

In area 1 I'll use the healing brush; in area 2, the Stamp clone tool is better.

If you're unsure about an area you've just done, zoom out and see how it looks in relation to everything else. Use the history palette to back-track if things arent going your way, and save whenever you feel you've achieved something. Move section by section - holding down the space bar gives you a grabber hand to make this easy - cover the whole image until you are happy and all the blemishes are gone. Remember you often dont need to paint out straight scratch-lines; basically you can disrupt them with short strokes, especially when the lines run across textures.

In my example, I'm not going to remove every tiny blemish either, as part of the charm of the image is its obvious age - in other words, I dont intend to make Gerald, Doreen and Victor Wright look like actors posing today in period dress. You can get pretty quick pretty quickly, changing brushes on the fly by Control-clicking on the image and swapping tools with keyboard strokes (strike s for Stamp and j for Healing Tool, and j again to toggle it with the Patch Tool). when you see professionals at work, its these little touches that make them look blindingly quick.

OK, after a bit of a struggle with the bleached-out brick wall on the right (solution: Healing Tool in combination with the Stamp using various levels of opacity, then some selective gentle blurring with the Blur Tool finished with a little shade accentuation with soft passes of a big brush using the Burn Tool) I decided to stop and finish the image.

Rest and recreation
Now, my image just needs a gentle contrast boost and a richer sepia tone to be able to take its rightful place in the family archive. Choosing Adjustments> Color Balance from the Image menu gives me the interface I need. Making sure Preserve Luminosity is checked, I changed the balance in the shadow end only to preserve that hard-won detail in the mid tones and highlight ends of the image.

Press OK and do any final tweaks with gentle tweaks of an s-curve in the Curves dialogue (Image>Adjustments>Curves). Now I need an Unsharp Mask - this Sharpen filter gives the most control and causes the least image degradation when used with care; still, zoom in and check over the image with a small Stamp brush to rectify any minor problems you may have created.

Be careful with sharpening; it works by changing the contrast of adjacent pixels so almost invisible blemishes will leap into prominence. These settings are pretty safe: its better to give two gentle Unsharp Masks in succession than to crank the Amount right up. Radius controls how wide the contrast between pixels expands, and Threshold helps prevent sharpening from generating noise in flat areas.

© Parkside Media 2002
For permission to use this document, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/hide comments

Show/hide comment form