Professional Photograph Restoration Workflow
Tutorial Details
- Program: Photoshop
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Completion Time: 1-2 hours
Download Source Files
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
In this tutorial, we’ll take an in-depth look at restoring an old torn photograph. Restoring old family photos is something that you can do for your relatives and bring tears to their eyes, and yes this is a service you can offer to clients as well. Let’s take a look at a professional workflow for restoring old photographs to their former glory.
1. Introduction
When deciding on which picture to use for this tutorial, I encountered the lack of material I could use in public. The picture provided is a family photo sent to me in a terrible scan resolution. But the picture was just the kind of picture I found right for this kind of tutorial. And the end result also shows that you actually can work on poor scanned pictures and get reasonably good results.
The print size is of course limited due to this. That said. The importance with this tutorial is guiding you through the workflow process. There are some important steps, however, you must keep in mind, but never hesitate to be creative and explore different approaches. The steps to follow are:
- Make a copy of the original to work from
- Adjust the dimension you need and crop the image so you don’t work on areas you don’t need.
- Retouch/restore areas in the image as needed.
- Remove noise or unwanted patterns
- Adjust highlights shadows and neutrals (in color photos you would also adjust skin color)
- Adjust the brightness and contrast
- Sharpen
Step 1
And now for the workflow and tutorial. In Step 1 I have already specified dimensions and cropped the image. You would then go about the restoration. I always start out in photos like this with the patch tool and get larger areas roughly patched. Then I get more specific and change between the Patch Tool, the Healing Tool, and the Clone Tool as suited. I’ll explain in more detail in the next steps.
Step 2
The Patch Tool works just as the Marquee Tool in regards to behavior. You drag a selection around the area you want to fix, then you click in the middle of your selection, and whilst holding the mouse button down, you drag the selection to another location in the picture with similarities and let go. Be sure to align your selection before you let it go. See next step and watch the alignment.
Step 3
Watch alignment in the shades of the curtain in the background. Do all larger areas in the picture. This tool not only works great, but it’s also a timesaver and a good way to start your restoration.
Step 4
After getting all the larger areas done change to the Healing Brush Tool (see corresponding red color in the picture below) and Clone Stamp Tool. As you work on your picture always feel free to experiment with these tools. If you are concerned with an efficient workflow, it’s good to get the grasp of these three tools.
Note that the Spot Healing Tool is also a tool you would use where, as its name suggests, there are spots. It works by just clicking on the spots you want to remove and I find myself using this often in some pictures where there are spots scattered around in the image. The workflow would then be to start out with the Spot Healing Brush, then changing between this and the Healing Brush Tool. In this picture, I had no need for it though.
As the picture below suggest, I use the Clone Stamp Tool at the edges of the picture. The Healing Brush Tool and the Patch Tool will usually create some effects you don’t want when you work towards the edges of a picture. Just try it out and you’ll see what I mean. Again, just change between the tools and feel free to experiment between them until you get your desired result.
Step 5
Here we have done the first part of the restoration.
Step 6
And now for the serious defections in our picture. Here we’ll use the man’s right eye to substitute his missing left eye. Just draw a rough marquee selection around his right eye, and then hit Command + J to jump the layer (copy the selection to a new layer).
Step 7
Then hit Command + T to enter the Free Transform Tool.
Step 8
Right-click inside the selection and hit Flip Horizontal.
Step 9
At this point, when you drag the selection over to where the left eye should be, you would want to lower the Opacity and align the eye with what’s left of his torn away eye behind your new layer. When you have it aligned, hit enter or hit the mark I’ve placed the green circle around (shown below) to commit the changes. Then raise the Opacity to 100% again.
Step 10
Now, with the layer selected hit the mask-button (as indicated by the green circle below) too apply a mask.
Step 11
Now we want to paint with black in the mask to hide the areas we don’t need or don’t want to see. When using masks the rule is: white reveals and black conceals. If you need soft transitions, use gray. A good way to paint away areas in your selection is to lower the opacity of your brush, then sweep across the areas you want to get rid of until you have the transition result between the two layers you would want.
Bonus Tip: Keep your finger at the X button to flip between black and white. It’s always good to go back and forth like this in smaller areas until you get what you want. The D key will make your foreground and background colors black and white if the colors are set to something different than black and white. If you want to see only the mask on your screen to smoothen out the areas, hold down the Alt key and click the mask.
Step 12
Now you want to do the same process with the ear. Depending on the picture you would try out different free transform modes you also could use. For the ear I did use warp. I also did a minor part from the hairline at the man’s right side, rotated , and scaled it slightly just to get a better start for the missing hairline. Then I cloned where needed.
If you look at my layers here, don’t be confused. The "retouch" layer is the next step, but when doing the picture I didn’t decide on the hairline right away. The layer called "Layer 1" is the hairline layer.
Step 13
After getting all the larger parts into place, I went back to the Clone Tool and touched up all the edges I needed to fix. This is what I put on its own layer; the "retouch" layer. Usually you want the Opacity on the Clone Tool set down so you get better control over the cloning and can do them in more than one sweep. Just drag over the area until you get the result you desire. Command + Z is of course something you want to keep your fingers at during the whole of this process.
Step 14
Often when you go about doing the last retouching, you would use different layers for different parts. If you don’t want a lot of layers, just merge them down when you are satisfied. I usually do small parts on different layers and merge them back to one "retouch" layer, but never merge these basic layers.
You don’t want to merge everything together if you later see something you didn’t spot right away. It’s always good to be able to go back and delete only the "retouch" layer, and fix that, or the eye-layer, if you found something out of place in it, and so on.
Step 15
So now the restoration part is done.
Step 16
The next thing I do is to select all the layers and group them. Command + G. Then I make a new layer from this group. Command + Shift + Alt + E and rename it "noise." This layer is for our noise reduction. One thing I want to point out, which I probably haven’t mentioned.
As you can see from my layers below I’ve kept the original file in the PSD as the background layer, and then turned it off. I like to keep the original file together with my PSD file, so I always start by jumping this (Command + J). This way I get an exact copy to work from, then turn of the background.
Bonus Tip: If you hold the Alt key down while clicking on the eye in front of the background image, you turn this layer on and all the other layers off. Click again to turn this layer off, and all the others on. Good for quick comparisons.
Step 17
Now we remove noise in the image. Noise reduction is done in various ways, but here I use the Reduce Noise filter found under Noise. I exaggerated the noise reduction a little for this tutorial, and believe my original numbers were 8 for the strength and about 20 for detail.
Another tip here is to go into the Advanced Dialogue and crank the strength up to full in the blue channel with 0 on details. In the red channel you crank also the strength up high with some detail, and leave the red channel with no alterations. This lets the red channel keep some of the details in the picture without blurring it too much. This technique I got from Taz Tally, and is what you also would want to do to remove patterns or scan lines.
Step 18
After noise reductions we would go on to sharpening. Sharpening is another big topic, but a common use, and a good one, is the High Pass Sharpening. When you apply the High Pass filter, you would want to use low settings.
For this tutorial, I have raised the values a bit too much, and you would want to see less in the gray picture than here. The edges are what you want to sharpen. There are also some technical issues you want to keep in mind.
When you sharpen for print, you always want to over-sharpen a little on screen. Printers have a natural way to blur out pictures a little. When you have applied the High Pass filter you would set the Blending Mode to Overlay or Soft Light. I usually make use of a little over sharpen anyhow, and then lower the value by using the opacity control.
Bonus Tip: Often you would want to sharpen only areas of the picture. In the example picture below, I’ve made a mask and painted away everything but the face, so this is the only part that gets sharpened. Often this technique is used for only the eyes.
The technique works also well using curves to lighten or darken areas of the picture. If you only want the eyes lighter, you would make a curves layer, hit Command + I to invert the mask, making the mask go black, and paint back with white where the eyes are, and so on. It’s quicker to invert the mask than starting to paint away everything you don’t want.
Step 19
In this final step, I did adjust the contrast with an s-curve. This step I didn’t make use of in my original file, and you would probably want to do it before the sharpening, but I added it here just to get a more complete workflow overview, since that is the nature of this tutorial. I often make use of Command + Shift + Alt + E to make a new layer from the layers below, and that’s what I would have done here.
I would have put the "curves" layer over the "noise" layer, then merging all the layers below to a new layer on top. Next sharpen this with the High Pass filter, keeping the curves layer intact, just in case I wanted to go back and adjust the last two steps.
2. Conclusion
So this was a the whole process of restoring an old, torn photograph. But keep in mind that a lot of these steps can be explored in greater depth. Always experiment and look for things you could add to your workflow to get an even better result.
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It looks like someone punched a dent in his face between the eyes. Sorry.
Hi there all. I guess my comments have gone unnoticed. I have asked psd-team to take it of the site because of the eye thing. I should of course paid more attention to it. But it was the workflow and the methods (how and when to use the tools) I had in mind when writing this tutorial.
So if you get a chance to read it before its gone, I just wanted to say that these are the steps that is involed in restoration and these are the steps which should be taken. From a to z.
Have a nice holliday all :)
- Damien Haw
This is a good tutorial but as most have said, the author should have taken the extra step to try and fix the cross eyes as well as to polish the left part of his face, which looks unnatural.
Looks good, I agree with the flipping issue being wrong, but its probably more to do with the eyes being too close together, anatomically the gap between your eyes should be an eyes width and maybe you should reshape the eye too. Although these are trivial issues as for a tutorial its really good for those who know nothing about restoring photos.
Shoot, having to see this tutorial makes me really feels in a design course room
His left eye was thrown off at some point. Other than that, it is good.
….eyes…. -.-
It’s the most awsome tutorial that I have ever seen,congratulations to the designer that made that amazing PS tutorial!
You fail. Just move the reflected pupil to the right to make it look like he’s looking at the camera. You made the poor fellow look mentally disabled.
Cant wait to see even one of the smug experts in this thread submit a tut showing us all the right way to do this.
Hi there Matthew. I must make a comment about this, once again. I did not fail, even though you all are right about the eye. This is a worflow tutorial, and I was concerned about getting all the steps down in the right order. You should also read the tutorial, those who have made comments based on the image only.
Ive talked to the psdtuts-team, and decided that the tutorial is good enough, even concerning the eye-issue. So guys and girls, remeber the word ” workflow” and we’re all ok :)
Thanks again for all the comments.
Happy New Year all and stay cool!
Putting-up a tutorial like this is even harder than the eyes.
Maybe he’ll do better if he need not mind being selfless, documenting everything for ungrateful TAD viscious amateurs who lack emotional intelligence.
great work…
thanks for sharing what you know
Awesome tut as usual. Thanks
interesting, but could be better. His eyes are so near one to other, the ear didnt need to be copied, etc etc…
but good work.
Érica
Cool, but I don’t like the “mirrored” eye.
geee…..Damien said this is a work flow…. the rest is up to ya guys to explore and make a great finishing. Give him a break~
Going through the comments here, I can see that 90% of the people that have commented are incredibly stupid and sound like a bunch of seagulls. All screaming the same thing. Learn to READ! I believe you’ll find in the title of this tutorial, the word ‘Workflow’, meaning this is not the exact way you should do everything to get THIS result. It shows the steps that can be used, should they be needed. Yeah sure he looks a bit funny, but thats not the point. Damien is merely giving examples on how to attempt to correct things. If in your own work you’re doing this and it doesn’t look right to you, then you can fix it. I don’t think he has to lay out every single speck of detail just to keep you all happy.
On another note, really interesting to see your restoration process. I’ve often wondered about doing this and now seeing the steps is quite informative. Yes the result is probably not how you intended it to look, but it is the steps involved, not the final result, that benefit the reader. Great job.
Really good tutorial. The result looks a bit too clean in my eyes but thx for the steps. Depends on taste how far you will go with the finishing…
Very Classy.
I have done this a lot for my grandparents and for uni.
The only thing that was worng was fixing up the eye. The guys face looks too A-symmetrical. Which is exactly what humans don’t have. You need to move the pupil on the right eye over a tad so it looks like he’s looking in the direction and the light reflections on the eye need to be on the opposite side.
Other than that, looks really good!
A good tutorial. However, after the described procedure, there’s certainly a lot of work left before the photo is finalized. This is how I think the man on the picture probably looked:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_48MgTo1T9xo/SXxY_Nk0r7I/AAAAAAAAAAM/sL3_rXdec2A/s400/Professional_Photograph_Restoration_Workflow_-_PSDTUTS.jpg
Keep up the good work!
That’s and improvement, give us some details of what you added or changed.
i think new eyes pupil is not right…
after all.. it’s great
Hello. And Bye. :)
Thanks for this tut! I recently started the huge project of compiling and restoring all my family’s old photos. This is really going to help with my WORKFLOW. Don’t worry Damien the point of the tut didn’t escape all of us. Just keep doing what you do and ignore the haters :)
While this tutorial is very good. I do have slight concerns that the eyes are a little off but can be sorted depending on the time spent and type of image.
The thing i dont like is the black outline and sharpen tool.
super tutorials & After effects
http://WWW.PAYLASCAN.ORG
I saw all kinds of comments on how people WOULDN’T do the restoration, but no solutions offered. All in all the restoration was fine work. Constructive criticism only needed here, thank you.
crossed eyed he is..but nice tut.
impressive work
Iam New to this PhotoShop and the computer part of Photography.
I am what you might call the Old School, where I am able to see and move about a Darkroom yet totally Blind in the Computer world. This Tut is of a great service to those photogtraphers just learning and your instruction was of great help to me. I am curently in a begining Ditgal Photo Class at my local Junior College. I have a D300 Nikon and a D40 Nikon. Thank You for this Tutorial Your Message…
There is still quite a lot of the damaged eye left, so I think it would be preferable, as Gerhard P has demonstrated, to use that and reconstruct what’s missing with a bit of artistic airbrushing. Gerhard’s results look much more natural.
But well done for an otherwise informative tutorial.
This is a TERRIBLE tutorial…it cost me my job
The guy looks cross eyed in the final picture. I don’t think this is the right place to go in order to figure out how to fix a picture.
i think this is a kind of good restoration i wouldnt actually call it professional restoration but its an experienced restoration i have done some restoration myself and i dont like the eyes and the right side of the face looks a little sloppy i think there would have been a whole load of possibilities the outsides are well worked but there are still differences in the face coloring as i see it
keep up the work just need a little more practice
Oooh, not the normal Tuts standard.
Basic resto with basic errors
That is really an amazing work. I will try this out on my old collection of photos. Thanks for sharing.
Great tut Damien, the result is irrelevant, the process is what helped me.
In response to the gentleman who commented above, Hair Restoration is temporary but the companies rely on your vanity to fleece you of thousands… shave it all off and be happy. If you really want hair, photoshop it on your head for the cheapest and best results.
Good day for all: (I’m spanish speaking so sorry for my grammar)
First of all I want to congratulate Damien for the tutorial, I was searching for how to on the web and this was the best one for me, I dont really want to go on with the rest, I had enough reading all this comments. but I just want to point some things out:
Everyone who posted comments about disliking the “eye” and so on should be following the procedure of Gerhard P plus explaining how would you do it best. this way we all learn, instead of criticizing…
Also I liked the way Teela, wrote about this it is exactly what I think.
Bobo, ha ha, you said you have lost your job? poor you… you should have been smart enough to read between lines of Damien’s tut and and get the essence of it and will do just great instead of assuming this is exactly how you should do it. (I understand Damien’s point)
From my side I just followed exactly what the workflow was about and work perfectly in one picture I needed to restore (this was the reason I was searching the web for instructions as I wanted to do a good job) which I did with this tut. Thanks again D. BTW my picture did not have the eyes involved for restoring so this tut was more than perfect for what I needed!!!
Now a message for some “again” please instead of making Damien feel bad about his finished product, you should add your own procedures ideally with pics, this way not only D, but all of us would not be loosing our time reading your no were to go comments. and we all have a great time visiting this site as it will be very instructive. How a better world of digital era and sharing will be if all of you “smart ones” do just that? Remember we want to be better but there will be ALWAYS someone much better than us out there, why not calling them up and inviting them to share? or is just the selfish minded that think they will die with the knowledge? pls if you think or want to be the best, SHARE your knowledge with others then you will become eventually the best of the west (and east) :) look out and start being one of them, I dare you… would you put aside your negativism and think about others? you think that this site is visited only for people who think is best that you? no, you are wrong there are many of us that sincerely look for some guidance and help.
Now D. I congratulate your courage of taking the time, plan, write, and post this Tut. i’m sure you will double check 3 and 4 times for your next post. but this is how we grow, don’t stop here some of us really appreciate your efforts and will make use of your knowledge as there are no others with the courage enough to do the same!
Regards
P. Hidalgo
Haha I really need this :)
Gave my own go at the photo restore for some practice, let me know what you guys think. Comments are appreciated :).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26595223@N02/3538777015/
That’s an improvement, give us some details of what you added or changed?
awesome!!!
It looked better in step 15 than 19, TBH
yes nice, but the eye is really bad done, its better to use cone tool only for eye ball and move it to the correct position
tnx!
those eyes are really weird…
Fisrt time here and I’m a little confused. I looks like people making coments are not reading the rest of the coments this is being going on since december! Come on like many of you said if you don’t like it just keep it to yourself. Enough with the bad critisism.
THX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This tutorial helps me to get a new job ;)
Well explained. Thank you.
An interesting approach. Overall the final image feels manipulated I wouldn’t say the eyes are too close – the right pupil is definitely cross eyed. You can see where the iris starts in the original damaged photo and the final is moved over considerably. The eye on the whole is in the correct spot though!
The shadow on the right cheekbone feels smooth and airbrushed. Also – the forehead feels flattened from the lack of shadow on the right. Taking clues from where the hot spot of the directional light you will notice it’s to the left (as reflected in the left eye). Really nice home work for the hobbyist – but not a great historical restoration.
Ah! The guy does look a bit retarded in the touched up photo, but it was a great use of tools in order to fix it.
i really appreciate author for this great work.