For this tutorial I’m going to show you a few concepts that you should understand to make solid ground as a photo restorer.

Here is what I’ve spend a few minutes working on before:

 

I’m not going to go through the entire process here because that will take too long but these concepts will enable you to complete a project of this difficulty for the most part. First of course, make a copy of the background layer so you retain an image of the original and now you can work on the duplicate layer to ‘restore’ pixels.

Start off with the clone tool in this case. Because the background is so bad, let’s start repairing that right away by taking good pixels and cloning them onto areas that desperately need it.

Find a good area that you can use, Alt click to get that as the source point and then go ahead and move your clone around, clicking and dragging to clone that area onto the new area. Watch the crosshairs when you can so you don’t overstep any boundaries.

You will be release clicking a lot and even more often to keep resampling your source clone if the area is not that large at all. This is ok as you can work fast. If you screw up an area and an ‘edge’ shows up meaning you’ve moved off the boundary then you can simply reclick again because with aligned turned off it will remember the same source point.

With aligned turned on, the clone stamp will basically follow your brush with every new stroke, which works great if you have a large area that you want to clone exactly. Otherwise for now, resampling from the same source point can work until you have a larger area, then you can carefully drag over more. The background isn’t super important, just get it clean looking. It might look like a pattern because you’re using the same source point a lot but that’s ok.

Once you’ve fixed the background to where it should be.

You can then start moving into fixing pixels by cloning on the actual portrait itself. Here you will have to be more careful and dainty for obvious reasons. We are restoring a person back to life and want to be as realistic as possible.

Here I’m cloning part of the hair to cover it up since it is all black anyways. Fix areas that you know aren’t going to be a problem first.

I’ll continue to use the clone stamp tool on these paper tears to replace good skin from a similar or close area to cover it up with. This is definitely a job for the clone stamp.

Carefully sample from similar areas by Alt clicking and then using a small brush cover up and get rid of the marks with skin.

On this part of the face where there are parts missing I am using the clone stamp by centering it on the area where there is a source I can draw from (alt clicking) and then carefully moving the brush up the side of the face keeping it centered and then clicking and carefully painting to get it aligned.

It still took me 3 times to get it right so I used Ctrl Z to go back in history to try and get it aligned just properly. Don’t be afraid to do this. You want to get it just right and centered properly so you have a continuance in line structure of the face.

Now I’m going to teach you another method so go ahead and create a new blank layer by clicking on the new layer icon

and with the clone stamp selected, choose Use all Layers.

This will allow you to collect a sample from all visible layers while still simultaneously being able to clone onto a new blank layer.

Notice that the visible right side of the hairline/face from our perspective looks ok, so what I’m going to do is clone that onto the new blank layer, carefully watching the crosshairs so I only copy the hair and not the background.

See where it is cloning on this new layer? Now, once you have cloned it to the point where you have captured that entire range from the ear to the recession of the hair (in this case) then you can move it around with the moVe tool.

Since the clone part of the good side of the head is on it’s own layer you can go ahead and go to Edit: Transform: Flip Horizontal to flip it around.

Now use Ctrl T or Edit: Free Transform to rotate it into position on this side of the face.

This is a great technique that you can use since human faces are mostly symmetrical.. so keep this in mind: taking good parts and borrowing them to repair missing or damaged parts.

Continue rotating until the hairline matches and move or nudge it into place where it sets.  You can see me do this same tutorial in video with my Photo Restoration training tutorials.

 Now you can take a soft eraser and carefully go in and get rid of any visible edges if you want but we’re still going to have to do more repair on this part of the face before the project is complete.

Create a new blank layer.

Now use the clone stamp on a new layer with Use all Layers clicked and clone the good eye onto the other eye on the blank layer.

Go ahead and flip it horizontal.

YIKES. Ok, Ctrl T to free transform that in place; no need to scale. Hey if you’ve got one good eye...feel free to be a digital donor for this person. Retouching is like makeup & nip/tuck and portrait restoration is often like digital surgery. Anyways, get the eye in place where it looks right.

You can hide it with the layers eyeball to get it to line up and move it in place as shown so you don’t have to just “eyeball” it (sic sic).

You can use a soft eraser here to carefully clean up any fringe pixelage that doesn’t fully match with the surrounding area (very faint) but you want to be exact.

Go ahead and look at other areas that need work. Here I’m using the clone stamp because the forehead looks ok I can sample it and make the brush smaller to start filling in the area between her eye and the still damaged part of the face. Then maybe I can carefully heal or clone from the other side of the face; it’s mirror to improve the cloned pixels once there are some of the (forehead) pixels there for color and placement.

You can organize these adjustment layers and ‘parts’ layers into a layer set for now. I recommend keep an original copy of the .psd so you can go back and make changes for your client, etc. instead of merging everything together. It’s ok to keep working/improving on the duplicate layer though as long as you want to keep all of that. But keeping the eyes separate gives you more flexibility, etc. And of course you’ll save a copy for web as .jpeg which will auto flatten all of the layers and retain your .psd

If there are layers that you know you want to merge together then go ahead and link then and then use Ctrl E to put them onto one layer.
 

Remember to use layer sets to organize layers and that you still have to click on a layer itself to work on that particular layer.

So here is the before and after...of course I’m not done with it.

I cover this one in more detail in the Photoshop Restoration DVD (I have to save some stuff) but I want to make you aware of several techniques that you can use to REALLY work on images that are just seemingly beyond repair. You CAN restore them using these and other techniques I teach.

Image restoration is something that takes time and patience to really bring someone back to life but there are tools that you can use and processes so you can make the whole process of using your time A LOT more effective than before. Spend your time restoring photos effectively instead of putzing around with the tools and get my photo restoration dvd training- you won’t regret it.