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Fixing a blotchy sky in PhotoShop.


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<p>I've got an old 4x5 B&W neg that I need to restore. The building burnt down, it was a historical landmark, and everyone that sees my one remaining print, wants one. The attached image is a raw scan.</p>

<p>I'm pretty skilled with PS until it comes to this situation: The sky is blotchy because the development was uneven. To make things worse, power lines run through the shot. Does anyone have any ideas on how I could easily fix this? Otherwise I'm in for a looong editing session. My goal is to get to an exhibition print via digital printing. Thanks for any ideas.</p><div>00U2j0-158385684.jpg.e0b768e1fa378e8261039367a744f865.jpg</div>

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<p>WRT the power lines and uneven sky, the quickest and most obvious fix is to simply replace the entire sky area with another sky. You can then use the patch tool to get rid of the power lines in the areas where they are in front of the silos. HOWEVER, once you do this, of course, the remaining stubs of telephone poles will have to go, and then the whole authenticity of the image is down the drain. For an image of historical importance, in general, one should not take liberties such as removing power lines. </p>

<p>There's considerable discussion of this and related issues of photo restoration in the excellent book:</p>

<p>Digital Restoration From Start to Finish: How to repair old and damaged photographs (Paperback)<br>

by Ctein. <br /> http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Restoration-Start-Finish-photographs/dp/0240808142/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248593274&sr=8-19<br>

Personally, I would only fix the blotchy areas and the blown building facade and leave the power lines in. To fix the blotchy sky, I suggest that you make a layer above this image, fill it with 50% grey and set its blending mode to overlay. You can then paint on this layer with a soft, large, low opacity brush to lighten and darken the sky as needed to compensate for the uneven development.</p>

<p>IMHO, the much more severe problem is the completely blown out front of the building. Unless you can pull some detail out of that area with a better scan, you are likely going to have to reconstruct its texture and details to make that area presentable. </p>

<p>I'm a relative newbie here on photo.net, so I'm not sure if it's acceptable to recommend another forum, but if it is, I would pose the same question over on http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/photo-restoration/. Those folks are experts in situations like this.<br>

Cheers,<br>

Tom M.<br>

Washington, DC</p>

<p> </p>

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<p>Thanks Tom. Actually, in the original, the building is not blown out. I just upped the contrast a tad to emphasize the sky problem. I did consider taking out the power lines/poles, but I agree, it detracts from the integrity of the image. Thanks for the link, I will explore the forum.</p>

<p>It seems like there ought to be some way to blend the sky. I've tried to grab the sky using Color Range, but the silos are too close to the same value, and it grabs them too. I'm sure the wand would do the same thing.</p>

<p>I should have also mentioned that the image I have a print of was destroyed when my business partner knocked over an open container of developer and fix on the original. This is the only neg I could salvage.</p>

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<p>Mike - Attached is the result of spending about 15 min on your photo. Obviously, it would look a lot better if I started from a higher rez version, without the blown hilights, but this will give you an idea of what one can do fairly easily using the technique of painting on an adjustment layer set to overlay mode. I didn't touch the front of the bldg.</p>

<p>Cheers,<br /> Tom</p>

<p>PS - Don't worry about grabbing the sky without grabbing the wires. Just paint over both of them on the adjustment layer.</p>

<p>PPS - I did do a few more things that I didn't mention in my earlier post. For example, I spotted all the dust, hot spots, and the fiber. In addition, I sharpened the non-sky areas.</p><div>00U2kS-158413584.jpg.37d6654aa4bd0d4fae1c6c96d620bb8f.jpg</div>

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<p>The phone wires were there and are there in the image. Taking them out would really impact the historical value of the image. After all, people use that kind of thing to date images and the other way around. Say, for arguments sake, that there is a debate a century from now about exactly then that phone trunk was put in operation. People would use your image among other sources to verify when it was and was not built.</p>

<p>Selecting the sky is no problem. Forget automated tools. Instead, make a new layer with the image. Add a black (transparent) layer mask. Then use a small fuzzy brush to paint the sky areas in the mask white. Since the border between sky and buildings is mostly nice and sharp it's pretty easy and quick to do. Once there I would try making a difference layer using Grain Extract with the average sky color you want, then do Grain Extract again with the result on the original image.</p>

 

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<p>From the looks of it, the building and silos should be pretty easy to mask but the problem is the wires and poles. I think my first attempt would be to create a new sky on a new layer using a gradient so you get a natural progression from light at the horizon to darker at the top of the frame. Try to make the sky a bit on the light side overall. Then mask the building and silos and foreground. (At that point you would see the new sky everywhere above the silos and building and the poles and wires would be obscured by the new sky.) Then I would go into the Layer Blending Options dialog and use the Blend If... setting for the underlying layer and set it so that you do not blend for the very dark values of the poles and wires. I'd also try cycling through the blending modes to see if any of them help. Let us know what works.</p>
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<p>First step is to clean up the mess in the sky with the Clone Tool as best you are able, using the Lighten and Darken modes for dark spots and light spots respectively. Stroking out the long streaks in the sky at left is no biggie, but you'll have to clone accurately to get the white spots among the wires. </p>

<p>Select the entire sky area with the Lasso, including poles and wires but not buildings, and Select->Save Selection As. With the sky area selected, do Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Curves, put a dot to hold the dark values with the wires and poles where they belong, and pull up the muddy gray tones in your sky to about what the lighter tones were, munging the lighter tones in the process. Click OK. Foreground fine, poles fine, wires fine, muddy tones corrected, light tones looking bleached. Bingo. Click the adjustment layer on and off, switching sky tones between mud and bleach, and check that everything else stays the same. Now click it on, click on the layer mask, and paint the bleached areas on your image with a soft brush in varying shades of gray, restoring them to their former glory.</p>

<p>You should be able to get a pretty even sky with this technique, or maybe one with a few wispy clouds. If it's not good enough, flatten the image, load your sky area selection, and use the Lasso to eliminate the poles and wires--quick and dirty, five pixels of feather or so. Hit the sky with some Gaussian blur, and maybe stroke the areas between the wires with the Smudge tool, getting the angle of the stroke just right so you don't have to worry too much about coloring inside the lines.</p>

 

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<p>Assuming that the wires are going to stay, IMHO, there is absolutely no reason to treat the sky any differently from the wires when correcting for the uneven development.</p>

<p>If a given area of the image suffers from either excess or insufficient development, then every object in that area of the image (ie, both sky and wires) will either be too light or too dark, and so everything in that area will need to be darkened or lightened. Thus, I see no reason to get involved with the time-consuming, fiddly work needed to separately adjust the sky between the wires.</p>

<p>OTOH, if, for artistic reasons, you want to treat the sky differently than the wires (eg, introduce a gradient in the sky), then you probably need to select the sky separately from the pwr lines, but to fix a problem with uneven development, I don't think this extra work is either necessary or desirable.</p>

<p>Am I missing something here?</p>

<p>Tom M<br /> Washington, DC</p>

<p>PS - As both I and the previous poster noted, to get a presentable image, one obviously also has to clean up the hot spots, dust and other trash in the image.</p>

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<p>Thanks for all your thoughts on this. Clone tool was the way I was going for all the dust.</p>

<p>John, I think you really hit on it. Try to lighten just the sky to almost white in another layer, use a gradient, then merge it back to the original with phone lines in tact. By lightening the sky, the power lines should stay dark. . Another method might be to increase the contrast to where the sky whites out. Let me give that a go and repost a result. Thanks kindly for all your time and advice.</p>

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<p>When using digital I find its is relatively common to get a blotchy sky, perhaps from over enthusiastic use of a "clarity" (also known as local contrast) filter which often produces this kind of effect when allowed to be applied to areas of apparent flat tonality. One technique I use if for some reason I cannot or do not wish to substitute another sky is to select the pixels representing the sky then apply a radical blur - usually gaussian but sometimes average or other kind of blur to smooth out the variations. This is a useful trick for any area of even color and tone if you have had to say use a clone stamp and it has left obvious marks on the subject area or if excessive image processing has produced posterization or other artifacts. Same goes for areas that have jpg artifacts from sharpening or perhaps dust spots from scanning. Anything like this will be aided. However I think you might have trouble with this technique because of your power lines but it may be worth a try.</p>

<p>Here is an example where I have had to use this technique to even up the sky areas.<br /> http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3233/3370801855_5037e0e64b_o.jpg</p>

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<p>Hi Peter, No, I just plain biffed the development. It is about a 20 year old image and I was using the zone system back then, doing some pretty crazy development times on my way to perfecting stand development.</p>

<p>So thanks to everyone. You gave me an idea about the intensity of the sky. I sampled the high and low values of the sky (that weren't blotchy), and made a new layer. I added a transparent graduated fill. Then I backed off the transparency until the power lines looked natural enough. The first shot at this, I found that making the layer too transparent caused the sky to be too light,so I used darker shades of gray, and did it again. Then I used mainly the Polygon and block eraser to cut out the edge of the buildings. I'm pleased with the way the tones worked out.</p>

<p>Here is the work in progress. I will play with the transparency a bit more, and I have to mess with contrast, dodge/burn, and dedust the image. Thanks for the idea!</p>

<p>Oops, sorry for the moire. It was a screen shot of the image, not the actual image.</p><div>00U3Dw-158753684.thumb.jpg.fd24670e782853b7cbb38d211c1fd4a3.jpg</div>

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<p>Tom, if the wires were in shades of lighter gray, you'd be right. But they're so close to being black that they're bottomed out and hence not suffering from the same degree of uneven development that shows so clearly in the lighter tones. They also have a slight fringe of lighter gray from the backlighting, and if that gets munged in the manipulation they will appear eroded.<br>

Note also that I'm not suggesting a major cleanup between the wires, but a few touches, and I specify the Smudge tool because you can blur small dribs and drabs in the sky with a stroke that doesn't affect the wires. Yes, you can use technology, but some things are actually easier done by hand. Different strokes, and all that.</p>

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<p>Charles, I hadn't considered the smudge tool. My problem was trying to get the edges of the lighter and darker areas to blend together. Would the smudge tool help this? It seems like I would have the same trouble as using a clone tool.</p>
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<p>Michael I understand this was a film development issue - not digital. I was just offering the thought that this problem is also not uncommon in the digital world so there are "fixes" available. Sorry if I was not clear.</p>
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<p>Michael, the Smudge tool has very limited value, and you have to like a hands-on approach to use it--recall I suggested actually painting the unevenness out of your sky. Because you've got a slightly curved contour line between sky color and wire color, moving the Smudge tool along that line will blur the sky color, blur the wire color, but not blur the contour line itself. It will blur small uneven areas in your sky, but if you've got larger patches it will streak.<br>

When you composite one image onto another, the color from the background should generally spill a little onto the fringe of the foreground image, otherwise it looks fake. Most commercial compositing software and Adobe's Extract feature do this automatically, and feathering and soft masking do something similar, but there are always areas that look unfinished, and I often smudge them very slightly.<br>

To blend two areas of different color where no contour line needs to remain undisturbed, I'd probably use the Blur tool, soft brush, as big as I could fit in. Very likely I'd lose some granularity and it would look fake, and I'd have to restore the granularity--while keeping the blended colors--with the Patch tool.</p>

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<p>Charles - Thanks for your response to my comment about just ignoring the wires. When I changed the brightness of an area of the image by painting on an adjustment layer (blending mode set to soft light), it hardly touches the darkest tones, so I didn't run into the problem that you mentioned. I do like the approach you outlined in your post of Jul 26, 2009; 03:43 p.m. Nice.<br /> <br /> I also found the discussion of the smudge tool very interesting. I must confess that I hardly ever use this tool, probably because my hand isn't the steadiest. Instead of using the manual smudge tool, I tried using the motion blur filter on small segments of the wires and sky, adjusting the angle of the motion blur as I went along to compensate for different sag angles. This semi-automated approach seemed to work quite well. I've attached my latest version below. As you can see, in addition to the vertical gradient, I left a bit of quasi random tonal variation in the sky. To me, it looks more realistic that way. Thanks for the suggesting this general approach. This has been a fun project. <br /> <br /> Michael A - It was challenging to work from a 600 px wide version of the original. The approach I took was to run the original through Topaz Enlarge 2x a couple of times to bring the width up to 2400 px. I did my adjustments at that size, and then, as a last step, downsized it back to 600 px wide to comply with the image posting size limits. Do you (or anyone else) have any suggestions about how to work with such low rez images? <br /> <br /> Thanks,<br /> <br /> Tom M<br /> Washington, DC</p><div>00U5FO-160045584.jpg.42c349c34b0fee188a9001f72fd471ef.jpg</div>
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<p>At very best, "smooth". Definitely not "brilliant" (pun intended) ;-)</p>

<p>You certainly do have a few more pixels to work with than us. It will be fun to see what the final version looks like ... especially, the blown-out bldg. I suspect it will make a very striking print!</p>

<p>Tom M<br>

Washington, DC.</p>

<p>(PS - The reason I always put "Washington, DC" after my name is to distinguish myself from the other Tom M on the board.)</p>

 

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<p>Very good thread. It's interesting to compare the wires in the various edits with the wires in the original version--they do appear fainter, and I'm hoping that's just in the low-res JPEGs. I believe Michael might have posted a higher-resolution version to expedite the editing that would simply not have displayed inline. Tom Mann of Washington, DC, you may not like a manual approach, but you're quick to grasp an idea and run with it. Regards.</p>
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<p>Charles - A couple more thoughts ...</p>

<p>a) I'm in full agreement with your comments about the low resolution and the wires, particularly those highest on the pole towards the LH side of the image. They were indeed the most problematic aspect of the re-touch process for me. If you pixel-peep at the original lo-rez posting at 200 or 400% magnification, the wires in that region are anything but black. The apparent size of the wires in that part of the frame are clearly sub-pixel, so the wires in that area came out as a 1 pixel wide line of grey (plus artifacts) in the original posting, not black.</p>

<p>Not having a higher rez version to work with forced me to use some pretty obscure techniques to preserve and even enhance what little contrast the wires had in that part of the frame. For example, I used a fractal upsizing program, Topaz Enlarge 2x, to get a reasonable number of pixels to work with. I've personally compared it to PS's native upsizing algorithms, and it clearly gives the re-toucher a major advantage when it comes to preserving and even "generating" realistic edges after upsizing. In addition, I then used Topaz Sharpen to generally tighten up the upsized image. I have a lot of sharpening tools and techniques in my kit, and IMHO, this particular Topaz plug-in is uniquely applicable to some situations in that it allows one to enhance (and control) edges without the usual USM artifacts.</p>

<p>It certainly would have helped to have a higher rez version to work with, but I fully understand why the OP might not have wanted to do this. In fact, while mumbling complaints under my breath about the low resolution we were given, I actually enjoyed the challenge this image presented because these sorts of image problems arises fairly frequently for me, and this thread gave me a chance to play with an image that essentially didn't matter to me.</p>

<p>b) Your suggestion to use the smudge tool prompted me to get re-acquainted with it, and, in fact, I recently used it to clean up some noisy edges on a recent portrait re-touching job. It worked *really* well. Maybe my hand isn't as shaky as I thought ;-). Thanks for the suggestion.</p>

<p>c) It would have been very easy for me to have simply painted in the wires at high rez using the pen tool and then stroking the path(s), but I have a philosophical problem about manually adding something that "wasn't there" vs "bringing out" details that were already present, particularly in an image that has historic value. The end results of the two methods might be very similar, but I can sleep better when, in images like this, I don't paint in details, replace the sky with another or with a gradient, etc.. Hence, my original suggestion to smooth out the irregularities in development by painting with a weak, broad brush on a grey overlay or soft-light adjustment layer rather than immediately substitute in a gradient. The latter certainly is a lot faster.</p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<p>Tom M<br>

Washington, DC</p>

<p> </p>

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