EclecticGuy

This photo was taken the day before my wedding on Nov. 10, 1989. My brother flew over from Germany (he was stationed in Mainz) and my Mom & Dad came to Boston for my wedding. My mom took this photo with a little point & shoot ASP camera in Faneuil Hall in Boston. It is my Dad’s favorite photo so when I was visiting earlier this year I sneaked into his office and scanned the photo. The print was 3.5″ by 5″ and not in the world’s best shape. The scanner was my dad’s and not profiled, but I did the best I could!

Here is the scan of the original photo:

You can immediately see some of the challenges:

• lots of dust speckles and scratches
• print grain
• cyan cast in the lighter colored buildings and pavers
• blue fringe around the tree branches
• blown-out sky
• poor exposure

My mission, to fix as many of the above problems as possible and create a 5″ by 8″ print, frame it, and give it to my Dad for Christmas!

Armed with Photoshop CS3, my Wacom Graphire tablet , and a lot of coffee, I set to work. Here is what I did:

1. After opening the photo in Photoshop I made converted to LAB. I like to work in LAB when an image has a lot of noise/dust and/or color casts. The noise is usually isolated to the L channel and color issues are in one or both of the A and B channels.
2. I made a new layer from the original photo used Photoshop’s Despeckle Filter to remove the dust from the L channel on this layer. This removed a lot of the dust and some of the film grain but not all of it.
3. Then I made sure all LAB channels were selected and then loosely selected the trees in the upper right with the lasso tool and added a new Hue/Saturation correction layer on top of everything. I selected the blue channel and desaturated it. This completely removed blue fringe around the tree branches (chromatic aberration). The photo started to look a lot better already.
4. I then created another selection around the domed building and the light grey building below it using a combination of the lasso and polygon lasso tools. Then I created another Hue/Saturation correction layer and selected the cyan channel. Desaturating this channel really made the building pop.
5. Next came the most difficult and time consuming part – using the lasso tool, I carefully selected my brother, Dad and me on the despeckled copy layer. Once the rough selection was made, I switched to mask mode and used the Brush tool to refine the selection. I’m not going to go in to detail on how to make a complex selection tight now because it would take a lot of writing! Once you make a selection like this it is a good idea to save it (Select->Save Selection…).
6. Once we were selected, I made a copy (command C) and then created a new layer and pasted us over the top of the Despeckled layer (but below the Hue/Saturation correction layers. On this layer, I selected the Multiply blend mode and adjusted the opacity until we popped out a little – somewhere around 20% looked good. This is a great technique to use to restore blown out areas if there is any detail left, or as I did here, to saturate the colors (especially the skin tones) without looking unnatural.
7. Now I masked the paving and created a Hue/Saturation correction layer to remove the color cast. I saved this selection also. After creating a new copy of the Despekle layer, I loaded this selection in to it’s mask. I then added a layer  style and choose Color Overlay. After picking a brick red color from the photo, I adjusted the transparency until the paving looked natural with a slight brick red color.
8. Now I turned my attention to the smoothing the color noise and film grain. I experimented with Noise Ninja and several Filters but didn’t really like the results. So, I created a duplicate copy of the file (saving the original with all of the layer work) and flattened it. I then selected just the L (lightness) channel and used the Blur tool to start to smooth the noise. This step took the longest time because I basically “painted” over the entire photo using a variety of Blur tool diameters and Strengths (usually I use 40%). This technique allowed me to smooth the blotchiness in the black building and windows on the left side of the photo, smooth the speckling in our clothes, etc. I used this tool very carefully on our faces with a small diameter and a low Strength. It took several hours to complete this step.
9. Now I decided to gently rebuild the missing arial on the domed building and the blown out wall on the right side. I used Photoshops Brush tool and a very light shade of grey (that I picked p from the photo) to very faintly add these elements.
10. With all of this work complete, I made another copy and converted it back to RGB and saved it as a JPG. I opened this JPG in Adobe Lightroom 2 to do one last enhancement - Vibrance adjustment. The Vibrance tool is not available in Photoshop CS3 (it is in CS4) and basically it saturates non-skin tones.
11. Back in Photoshop, I finish up with sharpening using the Unsharp Mask Filter. 

Here is the result:

(click to to see the full size image)

So, now I just need to print, matte and frame it!