Looking for some advice on how to fix this image

[bruzeines]

Hello. My name is Bruce Z and I am a veteran designer with quite a bit of retouching in my background. This one has me stumped and maybe it is that I haven't been able to keep up with all the upgrades to Ps so I am appealing to youm the expert Photoshop community to give me some suggestions.
This is a section of an old photo I am in the process of restoring. The damage comes from a fingerprint that has left yellow lines in the girls face. My question is if there is a quick way of selecting the areas damaged and converting the color to match the surrounding area so that the integrity of the face is maintained. When try to mimic surround pixels, the face is changed slightly and I am asking if there is another approach.

 

[JeffK]

I've been doing a bit more work with restoration and I can tell you that you need a whole different mindset than PS repair- and a lot more patience.
I don't know what your full image looks like and you intimate that it's a color image. Working with your portion above, I tried using just the spot healing tool, the regular healing too, and the judicious use of the clone tool set at about 50% opacity. Each area needs to be gone over carefully and put your corrections on a separate layer. Give yourself some breaks since your eyes play funny tricks.

Heres a comparison of before and after just with the right side of the face in the image:



You may need to swap out parts in addition to the edits - no shame in that since some parts may be beyond repair. Also depends on how true you want to remain to the original.

Time, patience, and just a few tools slowly and carefully - no magic button.....

Others may jump in with additional insight...

 

[bruzeines]

I have never used the healing tools, but thank you, I will try what you have suggested. I am old school and tend to go the long way as well. Being that this is an image of my sister, I didn't want to ruin the integrity of her face. I was easily able to fix other parts of the photo but this area presents a challenge.

Thank so much for you help.

 

[IamSam]

Can you post the original color version?

There may be some technique of selecting a color range, and altering the color of the thumbprint. This will also help in restoration as described by Jeff.

 

[IamSam]

This could be an example.

Original



Here I have isolated the thumbprint using dark vrs light pixels in the absence of (most) color of the background.
I then made a selection of the lighter pixels so that I could target their lightness.
With the selection added to a layer mask, I have used a adjustment layer to "blend" some of the BG thumbprint to better match the tones of the BG in this example...



Then I just used normal restoration methods (as Jeff described) to repair the BG. Very easy, less than 2 minutes.
Same can be done for the face, hair, and sweater.
Color would be easier to isolate.

 

[thebestcpu]

Hi @bruzeines
A couple suggestions (some repeated from other posts).
- I believe this is a color scan which can help in the repair process
What will also help is
- A scan in higher resolution (the repair areas are very small width in pixels)
- Saving in a non-compressed format e.g. TIF (not JPEG/JPG)
- Scanning in 16 bit format. The color differences with the fingerprint are there yet only a couple bits difference in 8 bit mode. 16 bit mode may make some difference it ability to recover the image better.

Starting with the best possible original is always the best first step.

As a secondary approach, sometimes take a picture of the picture on a copy stand with lighting off to the side, you can adjust the lighting so that the fingerprint are minimized. I have gotten great results of eliminated some defects on images with this approach. Sometimes saves a lot of hand touch-up or repairs that are guess guessing at what should be there at over-painting the image.

Just recommendations to consider
John Wheeler

 

[juco]

This is my amateur attempt using color range on the yellow parts then paintbrush (low exposure) with adjoining colour, then I used cloning from the forehead again low exposure to try and mimic the skin texture.