Comments on: Episode 103: Portrait of a Young Man

By: John

John — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:31:56 +0000

This was a wonderful episode, and it came just in time for me because I recently started a project of digitizing old negatives.

I have a box of well-preserved 4″ x 5″ glass plate negatives, family photos taken in the 1880’s and 1890’s. I placed the negatives on a light table and photographed them with a dSLR. I did all the preprocessing in ufraw (e.g., changing to grayscale and inverting the luminosity/saturation curve to change black to white, adding some contrast, etc.). I was reluctant to do anything in Gimp — like healing — because I wasn’t sure of what tools to use. This episode (and also 104) were just what I needed to move to the next step.

Incidentally, I saved the files from ufraw as jpg’s with 85% compression. If I view them in Fspot with the magnifier, I can see many artifacts. I can’t tell if these artifacts were from the negative (due to lens, emulsion, etc.) or problems that I introduced somewhere in my workflow.

For anyone who cares to have a look, here is a link to some of the photos on flickr: http://tinyurl.com/m59vnn

Again, many thanks for Meet the Gimp.

By: snow

snow — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:44:56 +0000

amazing

thnx

By: Rolf

Rolf — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:06:27 +0000

Norman, I would love to see and publish your result!

The crop I made for this blog entry is quite modern in cutting away things. I was constrained by getting it square, otherwise I would have chosen a different crop.

If you look at current portraits you see often even parts of the face cropped away. It would be interesting to follow the development of portraits through the centuries. Too bad that our art museum is closed for two years for rebuilding, otherwise I would be there now.

Another thing to think about.

By: Norman

Norman — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:00:58 +0000

I like the crop that Rolf has made to produce a nice, classical portrait. Doing this also makes the restoration much easier. However, I do not have that luxury, because the person for whom I am trying to do the restorations is not only interested in the person but also in the clothes being worn and, where relevant, the surroundings. I have eventually produced a result of the portrait that has been accepted although I am sure that some one more experienced than I am could do better. Perhaps I will send Rolf a copy for comment.

By: Dimmka

Dimmka — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:22:47 +0000

Что ж… и такое мнение допустимо. Хотя, думаю, возможны и другие варианты, так что не огорчайтесь.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:20:37 +0000

@Stephen: Very good idea. Perhaps usable for the reconstruction – to get the original crop back. I’ll try it.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:53:54 +0000

I think the curved, black markings on the source picture are more likely to have been caused by having the picture in an oval frame, rather than damage to the negative. Of course that doesn’t make any difference to the process of restoration.

By: Norman

Norman — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:32:33 +0000

The click and drag approach is also very useful with the clone tool especially when it is necessary to repeat and align patterns for example.The more one plays with the clone and heal tools the more one discovers their respective uses and versatility.

By: Tobias

Tobias — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:12:44 +0000

A big help for retouching old photographs is perhaps Paul Harrisons “Resynthesizer” Plugin:

http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal

Simply add an empty new layer above the image, take a brush and paint with your favourite color (mine is blue) over scratches and dust specles – or even bigger parts like coffee stains. Get a selection from the alpha channel (blue paintings), select the original image layer and start Script-Fu “Smart remove selection” (a part of Resynthesizer).

You can drink a coffee (or two) during processing – but the result is quite nice – especially in textured areas like the striped suit in the portrait.

Moreover, there are many ways to get a selection for Resynthesizer. Dust spots for example can easily isolated for selection with “Wavelet decompose”.

http://registry.gimp.org/node/11742

P.S. Wonderful tutorial Rolf – as always!

By: Rede

Rede — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:41:27 +0000

Thank you for this show on fixing old pictures, playing with old photos is a hobby of mine. I had always used the the “heal” tool as a one click fix, I had never thought of doing a click & drag.

By: Rolf

Rolf — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:03:18 +0000

According to Google above translates to “Russian, there are Russians! )”.

Ehmmm, well, yes, that’s true.

By: CreativeName

CreativeName — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:35:24 +0000

Русские, есть Россияне ! )