Photo Restoration Blog

Photo Restoration. Advanced Techniques – Matching grain

Ok so know we know a little about Image Resolution and how it might help us with photo restoration.

Lets now take a look at some advanced techniques to help with restoring old photographs.

If you need to restore a photo that comes in JPG format and has had its fair share of compression applied to it and you cannot do anything about for what ever reason, then have to work with what you have. Repairing it can be tricky as the dreaded JPG artifacts and slurred pixels can be a problem. Valuable parts of the image can be lost, particularly when working at finer detail levels.

Let me site an example. Figure in a dress, saved as JPG and the face has suffered a bit from compression artifacts and some detail has been lost. One way to fix this would be to artistically paint in using brushes and dodge and burn tools to recreate parts of the face. This will of course look too smooth. You can add grain as a fix but it doesn’t always work as its looks too uniform or doesn’t match the base image. With a combination of painting on a new layer over the original and trying to clone in some grain from below can help but also if you save out your new layer to a JPG and play with the compression settings, you will find that you can get some very similar JPG artifacts on your saved layer as the base layer. When its pasted back in you can then match the grain and base image a little easier than before.

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