Photo Restoration Blog

Posts Tagged ‘matching grain’

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.

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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