PCTalent Images

[Mr. Jean]

Cool stuff Cat.

[Mike-Casella]

Pure talent. Awesome!!

[Maritime Drag Racing]

WOW!! I have NEVER seen work that good before. Having tried to restore tons of those old scanned pics myself I can tell you what 'Cat did is nothing short of a miracle. I've spent many hours cloning good sections over bad, replacing colours, etc. I thought my results looked pretty good but on a scale of 1 to 10 with Cat's stuff being a 10 my pics are maybe a .001 or less. We are in the presence of a master!!!

[greenracing]

what an arteest

[WildcatOne]

Thanks very much for those kind words, folks...just as a summary on those pics, I scanned 'em at 300 dpi, opened 'em in Photoshop CS2, resized 'em both to 5"X7", did level adjustments...the hardest thing to do is to use restraint...that is, not to get carried away with those powerful tools...obviously, the wedding picture had all of the blue fade out of it. I did a subtle selective color edit on it, removing some red, adding a little blue. Then I went into the curves feature and took it slightly below center and to the right. I added a touch of contrast and brightness. Then I duplicated the layer, did a darken on it and made it at 10% opacity and fill..I'd say that picture was either taken in 1959 or 1962. The dresses are a giveaway...they look like tents got pitched on their chests...petite little ladies with 10-inch-long stilettos sticking upward and outward from between their shoulders...and the Connie Francisesque kiss-curl on the bride's hairdo...Other than having the color fade out, the wedding picture was in great condition (it's a Gittings portrait; the little green logo in the lower right hand corner) as compared to the black and white snapshot. I re-did the sky in it (magic wand, 5% grey, paint bucket, blur tool and clone stamp), removed the reflective crease across the knees of the horse and the girl on the right, and the girl on the horse's hair had a big black chunk as well as a lot of background and foreground flaking that had to be clone-stamped. I scanned it in RGB but converted it to grayscale after I did some level adjustments. What I put in here are 72 dpi jpegs I made out of them...Yada yada yada, you know, it's program talk, but when I was doing it, I wasn't thinking about what I was doing, I was looking at the picture changing and moving along intuitively, to which Photoshop does not lend itself very easily. But over the years, I've been able to get familiar enough with the program (through trial and error and I read the book a couple of times...I wasn't going to let that program beat me!) to not think too much about it and just work on restoring the picture. As of this year, my only regret is not finishing up Vic's Vega...I got stuck and the more I did on it, the farther away from what I was trying to do, I was getting. That'll happen, too...Anyway, thanks again, I appreciate those kind words. WC1
PS: Maritime, a very informative and helpful site that BP referred me to is
http://www.retouchpro.com
They have lots more than everything I would ever need...tutorials, examples, forum, data exchange, you name it, they got tons of it...it's the online interactive Encyclopaedia Brittanica of Photoshop and other photo programs...Cat

[Mr. Jean]

Thanks for the link WC. I gave it to Anne, as she is learning/doing some of this stuff too.

[WildcatOne]

Thanks for the very kind words, folks. Over the last couple of weeks, I've had a couple of jobs come in that I enjoyed fixing...they were challenging and interesting subjects. Here they are, before and after. Good news; last night Brian, Kyle's buddy, who does computer work and went to school for it, etc., told me he's getting me a major upgrade for my Mac. I'll be getting a new 320GB hard drive, a DVD burner, a new OS and printer, also I will migrate all my old stuff to the new drive. It should be good to go for several years...life is good! Cheers, WC1
Johnny's Mom, Before:

Johnny's Mom, After:

Football Player, Before:

Football Player, After:

[draglist]

Nice job, Cat! bp

[Rapid Randy Baker]

Wow, tuning a fuel motor is easy compared to what you do with the computer!!

Neat job!!!

[WildcatOne]

Thanks...the way I fixed Johnny's Mom was I copied 3 sections from her right side, pasted 'em back into the picture, flipped them horizontally, then transformed them ("distort") to fit over where her left side was covered with that stain. Then I blended them together by merging the layers I made and using the clone stamp, fused it into one image. The wall in the background was pretty easy to fix with the clone stamp. It was a fun job...Johnny was thrilled. She looks like a nice lady. The football player picture had been rained on or something and I just clone-stamped it till it was new again. Cheers, WC1