Digital Retouching and picture restauration is a field I really know something about. Specially back in the early 90thies I was considered an expert in digital retouching and did a lot of retouching jobs at this time. On a special occasion I was also retouching at the Joanneum Research for scientific analysis at the IIS -Institute for Information Systems, as they worked on creating the first film restauration software back then in 1990/91. They analysed my workflow to see what happens during the retouching process by letting me solving different retouching tasks to get an idea of what is needed, for example, during the elimation of unwanted subtitles and from that specific workflow they were able to work on solving it with automatisation. So retouching is something I really know more about than the average grafics guy.
So today I was glad to help a fellow Steemian out and recover an old photography of his grandma. The original was really damaged, broken, scratched and spilled and needed quite some attention and intense retouching of all the different kinds of artefacts.
the original
I started with the faces and cleaned them up with a cloning technique using cloner-brushes.
The key is to adjust the clone-offset many many times to pick the right sources fitting into the target zone.
The final raw retouch without any futher treatment looks like this
before/after detail comparison
recolored
resumee: Retouching by hand is still higher quality than any automated process, but maybe AI-assisted Software will do that 100 times better than humans in near future, we will see. My eyes are kind of tired anyway.
