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Extreme Imaging - Image Editing Specialists

Picture Fix Techniques

There are a lot of picture fix approaches.  These are a few examples of the way we fix pictures.

Sometimes stuff happens and pictures get torn into a lot of pieces like this one. Fortunately there is a way to fix it.

1. There are many ways to select parts of a picture using Photoshop® but for a job like this, I prefer the pen tool.  It’s a little difficult to use but worth the effort. It uses Bezier Curves to allow you to select pictures or parts of pictures with great accuracy.
2. After each piece has been selected, they need to be on individual layers so they can be moved together.
3. Once the pieces have been placed as close as possible, it’s time to get rid of the cracks using the healing brush, rubber stamp and brush tools.

Another example of willful damage to a picture.

This one isn’t actually as difficult as it looks because of the contrast between the skin tones and the marker.  If the marker had been red, it would have been almost impossible to fix this picture.  In a scanned photo there are 3 channels or colours – Red, Green and Blue which in conventional printing represent Cyan, Magenta and Yellow respectively.  When you view the channels of the photo with the marker on it, the Red (Cyan) and Green (Magenta) channels still show the marker because the blue colour of the marker is made up of Cyan and Magenta.  When you look at the Blue (Yellow) channel, the marker disappears because there is no Yellow in the blue colour of the marker.

Photoshop® has a lot of tools that would work well on parts of this picture but the only ones I used to fix it were the brush tool and curves. Most of the difficult repair work on photos cannot be done well without the ability to draw and/or paint.  If you have a look at the mouth of the boy in this picture you’ll see what I mean.  It’s almost gone in the before photo.  The healing brush or rubber stamp wouldn’t have fixed it so the only way to approach it was to redraw it with the brush tool.

Extreme Imaging - Image Editing Specialists

Background Change

We’re often asked how our background change or replacement photos are created and why they look so believable.  This post will go over a few examples and outline how we approach each one.

The success of replacing the background of a photo depends on a few things. Most important is choosing a believable background.

In this example the man is wearing a cowboy hat and is leaning his arm on another person.  The perfect background was a bale of hay. So perfect that no one would ever know that the background had been replaced at all.

Another very important thing to keep in mind is the colour of both pictures.  Notice in the “before” picture, the skin tones are quite pink.  We could have left it like that and changed the tones in the new background to be cooler but decided it looked better to add more yellow to the man, to match the tones in the new background.

Similar to the example above, this picture of a little girl looks very believable.

When told she would be going away to a beach for a holiday, she rushed into her room to put on her bathing suit (apparently she thought they were leaving right away).  Her parents thought it would be nice if they had the background replaced on the picture to really give her an idea of where they were all going.

What really helps this photo is the addition of a shadow. It was created by making a new layer and setting it to multiply on the layer below (the beach). Then, using the mask of the outline of the little girl, the layer is filled with a gradient and transformed or stretched.

Extreme Imaging - Image Editing Specialists

Photo Repair

Photo repair or restoration is an art and therefore is approached quite differently (with vastly different results) depending on the skill level of the person performing the work.  It’s important to see a lot of examples to make sure the artist meets your expectations. If you Google “Photo Restoration” or “Photo Repair” you can have your pick of thousands of sites.  Have a look at the wide range of quality available.

This example was quite difficult to restore and in order to save the customer some money we repaired only the important details and faded the edges to a soft oval.

These are the steps used to repair this photo:

1. Channel Mixer swapping the Green and Blue channels into the Red because the Red channel had the best contrast in this case.
2. Duplicate layer, then Curves to increase contrast (Levels would have worked as well, I just prefer Curves)  brushing the change through a mask, then flatten
3. Highlight/Shadow on another duplicate layer to increase mostly highlight detail, brushing through a mask and flattening again.
4. Redrawing missing detail using the Brush tool
5. Fade soft edges

There are a lot of similarities between this photo and the dark wedding photo above.  This faded mining photo was restored by:

1. Channel Mixer (Red Channel was the best again) to convert it to a black and white.
2. Curves on a duplicate layer to enhance the contrast, brushing in the change.
3. Curves again but this time on about 8 duplicate layers, each one with a curve applied for the various colours in the photo -flesh, yellow, red etc. brushing softly through masks to mix the colours.
4. The image is flattened and final tweaks made to the colour

Broken photos like this one can be repaired by:

1. Selecting each piece. There are a lot of ways to do this but the easiest for this one is the Quick Selection Tool.
2. Each selected piece needs to be on it’s own layer. The best way for this is to create a new document, slightly bigger than the final size of the image. Then drag (or copy and paste) each selected piece to it’s own layer.
3. Using “Edit/Free Transform” rotate each piece to fit together.
4. Flatten the image.
5. Use a combination of Curves and Shadow/Highlight to increase the contrast.
6. Fix the joins using mostly the healing brush.
7. Draw the missing pieces using whatever drawing tool you’re most comfortable with.  I prefer a soft brush and starting with Photoshop® CS 5, the new mixer brush tool does a great job at blending.

Extreme Imaging - Image Editing Specialists