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Wednesday 9 February 2022

Lost Colour - a postscript

After my last post I received an email from Adrian of Adrian's Images explaining how the pictures of the Scarborough let's-play-pirates ship and the Dartmoor ponies could be restored. Yes, even the Dartmoor ponies. Do take a look on his blog at what he did. It's amazing. Following his tips I'll be having another go myself once I get out the old computer that still runs my old version of Photoshop Elements.

21 comments:

  1. Well, that's encouraging, isn't it?

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    1. Definitely, although the proof will be in whether I can do it myself.

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  2. Wow! I'm impressed at how well he repaired that pic of the horses! The other one, of the ship, looks about the way it did when I fixed it here.

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    1. Steve. Duplicate the image, convert the original in the Layers bit to a normal layer, a right click it's of neither use nor ornament as a background layer, then apply the instrument of choice, it should come with a mask. Make sure foreground and background colours are B&W select Black press 'X' or use the wee arrow if it's the wrong way round. Get a soft brush and paint black on the bit that looks okay. If you want to see your mask which you will either turn of visibilty on the first layer or hold Ctrl and left click on the mask. If you press Ctrl, shift, alt and E it merges visible and you start again. Best to take skies out of the equation early doors and use non-compressed files.

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    2. PS. Unless you get either lucky or are a star bar you will foul up the masking. To correct it flip to white on your brush, Press 'X' and paint out the naughty bits. I adjust brush flow to stop banding. I'm no expert or authority I do like messing about with such stuff.
      Imagine having to do hundreds a day as a job. I'd rather polish behind the fridge.

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    3. I plan to rescan the slides I want to recover in png format. Fortunately, I don't think any of them have the colour variation issue.

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    4. Is PNG better than JPG and why? Or why not?

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    5. River .jpg is a loosy 8bit format (256) colours it's fine for Blogger. It is not a good idea to use it for capture or storage as it looses more information with every save.
      .png is lossless and at 24bit has about 17 million colours plus an alpha channel(see through or transparent). I don't have any cameras that capture in .png. I use RAW files then have to convert them to a Tiff file to edit. Confused? I am.

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    6. Correction for loosy read lossy.

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  3. Replies
    1. Absolutely. It seems a skill worth trying to acquire.

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  4. I have a different workflow for this. It involves many layers and mask adjustments to fine tune the result. If there is any interest in the subject then I'll do either a video or screen grab tutorial on Friday and most likely Sunday as I'm working Saturday then Tasker can post it. I'll send him all the words and music. You will need Photoshop which is blasted expensive as it's a monthly subscription rip off these days.
    Blender is free and very good but not for the faint of heart. Working 2D images is not too bad, I can do it in either. What I can't do is accurately colour correct as I have to rely on Histograms or those funny chromo something analysers, I'm colour blind the vast majority of men are so it's women's work. Think cleaning behind the fridge.
    I think my colour problem is getting worse. I got a new posh shirt from Hoggs last week. The lady serving was Polish and brilliant, I said I'll take this one with the blue check, she told me it was green with only a bit of thin blue here and here stabbing with her finger. I get one with mostly blue, I couldn't see the point but I was a little in love so anything to prolong the transaction. I'm better buying work jeans as I know they are blue.

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    1. As mentioned before, I've got protanopia (red weak) colour deficiency so have problems with this too. But I like things to look right to me.
      Photoshop is indeed now too expensive for occasional use. Many of these companies now want to create income streams rather than sell things outright. They used to bundle Photoshop Elements with scanners and cameras but not any more. I have kept an old computer specifically for running older software.

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  5. 'Beyond everything': One woman's ghostly odyssey around Ireland.
    Sean O'Hagan. The Guardian (online). 2016.

    A brief look at the work of Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen, who made repeated trips to Ireland after the death of her husband.

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    1. Thnk you Joanne, I'm certainly going to need it.

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  7. I had a look at Adrian's work and I'm very impressed.

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    1. I don't always agree with some of the things he says, entertaining and challenging as they can be, but you can't deny his imaging and 3D abilities.

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  8. Adrian has talent. I like his improvements to the photos.

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    1. I agree. I'm going to try again myself, and if I get anywhere near then that's a success.

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I welcome comments and hope to respond within a day or two, but vision issues are making this increasingly difficult. Please note: comments on posts over a month old will not appear until they have been moderated.