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Professional photographer Jeff Comella wanted to restore a cracked 1900s photo of his grandmother to make a
warm family remembrance. To balance retouching the aged effects while preserving the photo’s
vintage look, he not only added a sepia tone, but also opened an eye and visualized absent colors.
Comella feels it’s crucial to develop
an overall strategy before beginning
a restoration project. “I’ve seen people
spend four hours restoring a photo
and still end up dissatisfied. They just
aren’t sure what to do with it,” Comella
says. “With old photos, you often
can’t see details anymore, so you have
to decide what elements should look
like beforehand,” he says. “I make
notes using the Pencil tool on a separate
layer to plan my strategy.”
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To repair the photo’s cracks, Comella
selected an area with the Lasso tool,
feathered it, and copied it to a new layer
(Command/Ctrl-J). He selected the
Clone Stamp tool with a soft brush tip
and clicked Use All Layers in the Options
bar. To better concentrate on details,
he chose Window > Documents > New
Window, then zoomed into the new window
and cloned on it while watching his
actions simultaneously affect the photo
at a normal view. By cloning major cracks
on separate layers, he was able to retain
some of the original through layer Opacity
as opposed to the one-time Edit >
Fade feature. Cloning had softened some
layers, so he applied Filter > Noise > Add
Noise to them bring back texture.
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The subject’s facing right eye was
shut due to long camera exposure. He
lassoed, feathered, and copied the open
eye to a new layer, then temporarily
lowered its Opacity to position it over the
closed one. Due to the angle of the face,
he needed to slightly foreshorten the
new eye. He pressed Command/Ctrl-T,
then Command/Ctrl-dragged a selection
handle to distort the eye at a realistic
angle. To blend the eye into the face,
he cloned around it.
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Before adding color, Comella wanted
to produce overall warmth with a sepia
conversion. Since he created several retouching
and color layers, he needed a
fast way to composite them for global
effects. He added a new layer above
the layers he wanted to composite and
pressed Shift-Option-Command-E
(Shift-Alt-Ctrl-E). This produced a
composite of all visible layers without
merging them to which he added a Color Balance adjustment layer.
He increased the Yellow and Red in the
Shadows and Midtones, but mostly the Yellow in the Highlights. He warns to be
careful when increasing Highlights because
they can burn out quickly. “Watch
your RGB values in the Info palette and
avoid letting highlights go above 247,”
Comella suggests. “It’s a good idea to
check density, too, so set your Info Palette
Options to Lab Mode for the Second
Color Readout.”
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Although he didn’t want to overwork
the photo into a painterly image,
Comella wanted to hand-paint elements
to draw attention to faded details. For
a fern below the window, he added a
new layer and set the blending mode to
Color, then used the airbrush to paint the
fern yellow. For depth, he added another
layer and painted with light green and
added another layer to paint dark green.
He continued to paint layers, adjusting
the Opacity for each until he had pleasing
color. To blend the colors, he applied
slight Gaussian Blurs to some of the layers.
“Sometimes I even duplicate a color
layer and change the blending mode to
intensify color,” he says. “I might also offset
the position of the duplicate’s color
from the underlying layers.”
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Instead of using the Dodge and
Burn tools, Comella prefers to enhance
contrast through painting, so he created
new layers at the top of the palette for
highlights and shadows. He then set their
blending modes to Overlay. For shadows
and highlights, he painted on two layers
with a black brush and on one layer with
a white brush. “The technique is derived
from the concept of painting on a layer
mask,” he says. Comella feels the application
performs faster with the brush, and
cuts the frustration of scrolling through
numerous dodge and burn states when
using the History palette. It also allows
him more flexibility to decrease layer
Opacity, add a layer mask to hide and
reveal paint, and duplicate the layer to
intensify effects.
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The final image is shown at left.
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Jeff Comella is a master photographer, with BA and AS degrees in Photography and Multi-Media.
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