Hey.
Finally given first assignment for digital art class. It’s called the Photo Restoration Project; basically students use Photoshop Elements to repair a set of damaged photos (3 in all) and make them look brand new without it ‘screaming’ Photoshop. On the first day of class we were introduced to the stamp key. We learned the key shortcuts (pressing “S” for stamp, “Z” for zoom, and so on) and learned what the stamp key does, (basically takes pixels from one area and moves them from one to another).
After a brief introduction to the stamp key, and a few days of practice we began our assignment.
I started with what I thought would be the easiest: called “the lady.”
Things started off positive. I began with her hair, which was faded and full of rips/ creases/ white patches. I highlighted the darkest pixels of her hair using the “Alt” key then fixed the faded grayish-brown patches to make them the same black shade as the highlighted area. It took time to fully fix her hair though, since there were patchy moments where a strange dark gray pixely color appeared in her hair. When this happened I went over it with the dark shade again, making sure that the hair was one flat black shade. Another area of trouble was the small part near the center of her face. It was way to high and looked funny when I left it as it was; so I quickly cut it down lower to suit the new hair do she was receiving. It was tricky finishing the outline of her hair since some spots were faded curls, that I had to patch over (now they look like black clumps of hair), and the little areas where hair had to be fixed in the crown was no walk in the park either…(used small stamp tool for these).
The crown itself was a struggle, since I discovered that most of it had rips and white patches in it. I used smaller stamp tools to fix the patterns on the crown and erase the big/ small pieces of rips that I could spot (not sure is I got them all but I did the best I could), and then moved on to the face.
Her face was easy for the most part. The only parts that bothered me was when I tried to get the stamp tool to collect the right shade of gray so I could fix the little patches on her skin. I used medium and small stamp tools to fix this, and tried to fix the strange dark gray marks on her forehead (looked like scars???). Next, I worked on her lips, which took me a few seconds (just fixed some dark patches and reformed the shape of her lips), and then I moved on to her shirt (oh my…).
The trickiest part of the photo so far was her shirt because it had a lot of white patches and was cut off at the sides of the photo. I started with the small missing patches of shirt first. Then moved to the collar of her shirt where I struggled to fix the shadows using medium and small stamp tools. Next I worked on filling in the bigger portions of the shirt using a medium stamp tool (some used the larger stamp tool here but I thought it came off too pixely, well I think mine came off a little pixely anyway…).
Once the shirt was finished I fixed the background by taking the darker pixels of background. This was not easy, since there were almost several different shades of gray in the background (I chose 1 and stuck with it). I covered the whole background with a darker shade of gray using the medium sized stamp tool and filled in missing corners or sides of the background using a smaller stamp tool (I think it may have come out a little uneven on some sides but it looks good from far), this was tricky since at some points since I had to also gather pixels from the outer border and separate the white area from the rest of the picture.
Once I did all that I finished the project and…here it is!
Enjoy.
Before:
After:
