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Newbie needs some guidance on how to enhance my concert photos


who4ever

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I am just getting started with PS. My main reason in getting the program was to edit hundreds of concert photos I took in the 70's on 35mm film and had developed my mail in companies (remember Clark, anyone?) Most of the photos are lousy, but they have great sentimental value and it is time for me to try and resurrect them. Like most newbies, I find PS overwhelming but want to dive into it. Can anyone give me some guidance on the basic steps needed to start improving this photo, which is among the worst of them because in addition to the poor exposure, the developers cut the negative through the picture, then taped it back together and printed the photo, which I recently scanned. I need a few basic steps to enhance the overall image and then to get rid of the line. I want to do this myself, I am not asking anyone to do it for me. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks so much.
 

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Tom Mann

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These are difficult images to work with. A wide variety of Photoshop techniques is necessary to get something like the attached tweaked version, and, to be honest, I think it would be beyond the skill set of someone just starting out in PS.

Anyway, see what you think. If you want me to do so, I'll be happy to write up a summary of the techniques I used, but it probably won't be for a day or two.

Pls excuse the name of the noise reduction software that I used. I tried several different types of NR and annotated the results of each to keep them straight.

Cheers,

Tom M
 

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Eggy

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I had a go at the first picture.
This is the best I could achieve. I applied a lot of techniques and I can't remember them all.

11132015_0010_aJPG 002.JPG

About a year ago I started cleaning the slides made in the late 70s and early 80s by my late father in law, some 1300 pieces.
It was a painstaking work.
Opening every slide, cleaning them, scan and process in PS. Every picture needed another approach.
 

who4ever

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Tom, very nice work. I would love a summary of what you did. Am I also to understand that you used a different program for noise reduction. Does PS do this at all?
 

Eggy

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Eggy, can you remember any?

I applied a curves adjustment layer, hue/saturation adjustment layer, curves layer and a vibrance layer.
I used Topaz Lab filters, DeJpeg and DeNoise. I think I had to repeat this a couple of times.
Then I used Topaz Adjust 'soft focus2'.

I think after this a made a composite snapshot (shift+ctrl+alt+E).
I applied a hue/saturation and brightness/contrast adjustment layer.
Last but not least, I had to repair the cut, doing it by using the healing brush tool, clone tool and burn and dodge tool.
Removing the spots dust and scratches with the healing brush and spot healing tool.

Untitled-1.jpg
 

Tom Mann

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I used the following steps:

1. Used PS's polygonal lasso tool to quickly select an area slightly larger than the gap between the cut pieces.

2. Used PS's content aware fill (color adaptation on) to fill in the gap

3. Manually touched up any areas that content-aware fill had problems with. This involved multiple steps and several different tools.

4. I own 7 or 8 different noise reduction tools (most commercial, not free) in addition to the NR tools included in PS. Each of which works best on different types of noise. I tried a few of them and decided to use this one: http://www.projects-software.com/denoise-projects/ . This required exporting the result of step #3 as a TIF, running the external program, and then bringing the image back into PS.

5. Applied the following PS adjustment layers: Curves (twice - different curves in different areas), Hue/Sat, and Vibrance/Sat.

6. Down rez-ed the image to < 700 px in the longer dimension so that the forum uploading software wouldn't try to compress it.

7. Applied some USM (Photoshop's unsharp masking) to slightly sharpen the image at its final resolution.

8. Posted the image in the forum.

If you are not familiar with a term like "content aware fill", just Google something like {"content aware fill" photoshop tutorial} and you will be amazed at how much information is available on any minute topic having to do with Photoshop, LOL.

The key to success in a process such as the above is not just simple familiarity with each of the tools used, but being able to select the best tool from among the many other tools available for the particular situation (ie, most effective, but fewest unintended consequences), and then applying it with appropriate internal settings as well as the best layer blend mode, layer opacity, layer BlendIF sliders, layer masks, etc. etc.

HTH,

Tom M

PS - I forgot a step: I manually "spotted" lots of the small imperfections in the image twice. Once at the very start, and once after contrast and more saturated colors had been developed to pick out the less obvious imperfections. I typically use a combination of PS's stamp tool, healing and spot healing brushes, and the patch tool.
 
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