From the course: Photo Restoration: Fixing Water Damage

Plan the restoration - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photo Restoration: Fixing Water Damage

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Plan the restoration

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- [Instructor] Let's move on to planning the restoration. Best way to start is to straighten and crop the image. You can see it's a bit wonky on the top here. And then move on to restoring the mire damage as best we can. From here we'll have a better starting point for the major restoration work. In order to fix such a vast area of grass, the best solution is to replace it with a similar grass image, either one we shoot ourselves or a free stock photo. If we pay attention to the matching angles and lighting, the replacement should be fairly simple. The feet and legs are a different ballgame. We could draw them in and try to make our drawing look as photographic as possible, or we could search the internet for a suitable donor image. Doing this we might need to take into consideration copyright and possibly end up having to buy stock image and this makes our image more complex than it needs to be. There is a third option we should consider, which is taking our own images to fill and replace the missing parts. We can do this by making sure we observe the camera height and angle of the lens and lighting, and we should be able to produce some usable images. The shot appears to have been taken with a mid-length lens, not a wide-angle mobile phone. So we need to use a camera with zoom. All the men seem to have black trousers and, quite probably, black shoes, too. So by observing the angles of how the men are standing and the soft lighting, we can replicate the stance of all the men by taking some photographs outside with our own camera. I've done this for you and we'll pick this up in chapter four. I shot the images on a tripod with a timer and we got some good images for replacing the detail in the image. Once we've fixed the grass and legs, we would need to move on to the fence. And the best way to tackle this would be drawing and shading. Cloning's not going to work very well in this area. There just isn't enough of the fence in the right proportions to clone into and replace. And once we move on, we can draw the struts on new layers and create a new fence panel. When we have it all replaced, we can blend it all together, hopefully for a convincing result. Our first chapter has covered assessing and planning the restoration. This is an important part of a complex restore. Knowing what steps to take and when will ensure our restoration goes smoothly, even with a seemingly impossible restore as this.

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