Photo restoration and matching grain for photo repairs
February 24th, 2009
This is a follow on post from my original matching grain article a while ago.
This is just one example of how to match grain when replacing a back ground or perhaps any part of an image.
Look at this image, it is part of a man’s shoulder and the background could do with evening out or replacing altogether.
Here I have just selected and deleted the back ground to white. It does not look at all right.
Above a blur might clean up the background. Whilst evening out the background it still does not match very well.
Here I have added some grain (noise) but it still does not match. If I apply a blur to this then we can achieve a better result.
With a slight blur its much better and using the correct selection technique for the original background selection it looks fairly convincing. Using this matching grain technique and varying the amounts of grain and blur ratios and perhaps even repeating the process a few times along with varying the type of noise, we can achieve different patterns of grain to suit nearly every situation.
For a short video on this topic see below.
Posted in fix my photo, image resolution, image restoration, Image-Restore news, old images that need restoring, photo repair, photo restoration, photograph restoration, photographic restoration techniques, photoshop, photoshop techniques, restoring old photographs, restoring old photos
[...] If you are inserting anything into an image especially skies, match both the edge definition and the grain. Old images have natural random grain that doesn’t mix that well with flat computer generated tones. Skies will look fake and nasty. If inserted with bad selection they will look even more amateurish. Matching grain video [...]
[...] Hello everyone, continuing with the basic skills photo restoration tutorials, I have another here which touches upon matching the grain within a photo when replacing a background. You can read more about this topic in the matching grain blog post. [...]
[...] I get two or three emails a day from wannabe restoration artists who replace backgrounds routinely. Frankly I am not a fan of this practice. Most are done very badly, with the old, ‘render clouds’ filter and then over blurred with no attempt to match the grain. [...]