You’ll remember last week I started a pretty large photo restoration project trying to piece together an old photograph.

This week I’ll show you how I go about “healing” the tear line and removing some of the major blemishes from it.

When you’re working on something particularly heavy-going it can be difficult to see what’s going on after a while. I like to go away, have a break and go back to it with fresh perspective. That’s exactly what I did today and when I went back to start working on the project again I noticed I hadn’t lined it up quite as well as I thought.

Initially it looked as though the picture was lined up pretty well - the bars on the window, the man’s face and even the edge of the picture looked fine but when I zoomed in to start removing the tear line I noticed the white border on the left wasn’t aligned correctly (see left). Everything else looked right so what’s the problem? Rotation.

That’s something to keep in mind when you scan images - no matter how carefully you line it up on the edge of the scanner either by static or airflow the image nearly always gets moved slightly.

Rotating the top portion by just -0.23° fit everything back into place.

Before beginning to heal the tear, areas of special detail will probably need their own treatment. You’ll see where the tear passes through the man’s face that there is still some black feathering from when it was scanned. On other areas of flatter colour, like the curtains or walls, it’s simple to clone this out but where there are detailed features on the face we’ll need to remove as much contamination as possible. The layers will need to be flattened later so it’s important to get rid of anything along the borders at this stage.

Now that the harsh black edge has been removed, the extent of the tear can be seen. It still looks severe but it should be much easier to heal up later.

When you’re happy that all the detailed areas have been cleaned up it’s time to save with a new file name (so you can go back if you go wrong) and merge the layers. Select the top layer and go to Layers>Merge Down to flatten the image into one layer.

Now let’s begin healing up the tear.

For small differences I like using the Heal Tool . It’s somewhere between Smudge and Clone and samples the colour and texture of the surrounding pixels so you can paint a kind of average colour. Ctrl+click on a clean area near to your tear to set the target area, now use your cursor as usual to paint over the tear. Be careful to keep your target away from the edges or you’ll get unsightly white or dark smudges in your freshly papered-over crack.

Heal smooths it over but because the colours are based on the surrounding colours there’s still a visible darkened area. This is where Clone comes in handy.

Clone works in much the same way as Heal so use Ctrl+click to select a clean area and paint over the darkened line where the tear was. The key to avoiding circular patterns is to keep the brush moving rather than dab at areas. Clone will copy the area under the target cursor to where you’re painting. To avoid noticeable repetition you can build up layers by setting the brush opacity to 50%.

Left: Beginning to heal the tear along the border, Right: After healing and some cloning.

Areas of flat colour like that are easy to fix. As you work along the tear, repeat the same process to close up any gaps. On areas like the curtains take care to keep your brush strokes vertical to blend in with the transitions from light to dark.

You’ll probably find you will need to switch between Clone and Heal as you fix up the tear. For areas where there is a lot of colour missing you could try cloning at 100% opacity to fill the gaps, then heal to blend it and then add detail again with 50% opacity clone. There are no rules on how best to do it so experiment until you get something you’re happy with. The Undo Command (ctrl+z) will come in very useful.

You’ll also find that you’ll have to change between brush sizes depending on the detail required. For example, replacing the window uprights required a very small clone brush. For large areas of one colour increase the brush size to reduce repetition.

Here’s how the photo looked after fixing most of the tear. I’ve left the face and shoulder area alone to work at in detail (left).

To try and repair the face zoom right in - enough to work easily on the area but far enough to have good overview.

Much of the man’s chin was lost when the photograph was torn so it will have to be reconstructed. For this I first cloned the area, using a very small brush, trying to match the skin tones with the contours of his chin. This was pure guesswork since we’ll never really know how he looked.

Cloning produced a rather chunky pixelated look so this was softened using the Heal Tool. The image below shows before, after cloning, after healing on chin.

There’s so much of the face missing we’ll have to guess at that too. Using a combination of Cloning and Healing, sample areas near to the tear and replace the lost areas as done with the chin.This was by far the most challenging part of the photograph.

Here’s how the face looked after a lot of work.

The original photo had a stain right on the corner of the mouth. After some deliberation I decided to leave it there. Trying to repair that would have meant that 70% of the mouth was replaced and in my opinion that would have had too much impact on the face.

I also chose to leave the stamp mark from the original picture and the crease that ran through the woman’s body.

I felt that the stamp didn’t detract from the image and rather it added to the character of the image.

The crease through the woman’s body was left because to remove it would have altered the image a lot. You can see that there’s a large colour difference either side of the crease requiring a lot of blending between the two tonal areas which may have resulted in a “touched-up” look.

So here is the before and after:

I hope to print this onto some cotton rag to complete the restoration.

If you want to have a go at this, go here and read through part 1 of the tutorial and download accompanying file if you want to work on this image.

Do you have any comments or opinions on this? Did you try the restoration yourself? Got a better method? Let me know with a comment.

A while ago my soon-to-be mother-in-law dropped by with an family photograph she had found in a box of old pictures. She was putting together her family tree and this was the only existing picture of some long-dead relations - but it was torn in half and pretty battered. To make matters worse, since I had taken this copy the original had been lost. Could anything be done to restore it? Here’s my attempt.

The image was scanned as below at 400dpi. I realise I could have pieced the picture together before scanning but I thought scanning them as two pieces would allow for greater flexibility.

You’ll notice that there is a certain amount of overlap; an area of paper is visible where the two pieces sheered away from each other when it was ripped. This will need to be remedied later.
To start piecing it back together I had to get rid of the black area created by the scanner. Thankfully the Scissors Select Tool was made for this kind of thing!

Look out for an in-depth tutorial on this tool in the next few days.

I cut out each half and pasted it into its own layer. I could then move the bottom half up the canvas and begin piecing it together.

The torn areas from the top layer continue to show through while underneath it the missing part of the picture is hidden. You can also see that although the Scissors Tool did an excellent job of detecting the edge of the photo, there’s still a feathering of black.

The next stage is to move the layers around until the picture is as well aligned as possible. Luckily with this picture the vertical and horizontal bars of the sash window made it painless to line up. Without something like that you could carefully align it by eye or use the edges as a guide. When moving the pieces around the arrow keys will let you to move each layer by a pixel or two at a time.

A few large areas of paper were showing where the tear occured. To get rid of this it simply needs to be removed from the top layer as the missing fragment should still be present in the layer below. For this I’m going to use my favourite - Scissor Select.

The light brown area along the margin is where some of the coating has lifted away from the paper. This will have to be rectified later by reproducing that part of the image.

Once the torn edge has been minimised the photograph looks more crumpled than torn and you can start to see the man’s face.

The final stage for now is to zoom in and work along the tear, removing any feathering that may have occurred.

Stick around over the next few days when I’ll be showing you how to reduce the blemishes in the photograph and begin to sympathetically enhance it. If you want to work along with me you can download the original file. As always, don’t forget to read the license.

Last December I took a series of photos at a beach near my home town. I wanted to frame some to hang in my hallway but to space the frames nicely I needed 6 photos… I only had 5 good shots. Time for some GIMP trickery!

After picking my favourites I was left with a few other shots that weren’t up to scratch. I liked the foreground in this first photo but the detail in the sky did not print well and it just wouldn’t have looked right with the others. On the second photo the sky was nicely exposed but this left the foreground dark. If only I could have the foreground from the first photo and the sky from the second.

With a nice defined horizon this should be really easy - except for the sea spray. It would ruin the picture to try to remove it so I’ll have to work around it.

I was standing on slippery rocks on a very windy day when I took these which explains the wonky horizons. To remedy this go to Tools>Transform Tools>Rotate (or Shift+R) and rotate until the horizons are level. For this example I had to rotate around -1°. You may find showing grids and guidelines, View>Show Grid, helps you get it level when performing this kind of task.

Rotating creates blank areas on your canvas where you’ve straightened up. The blank area plus some of the photograph will have to be cropped to square the image.

Use the Crop Tool to draw a rectangle inside your photograph avoiding any blank areas. Press Enter to complete the crop when you’re happy with the selection.

Now the images are straight we’ll begin combining them. On one of your cropped photos go to Image>Image Properties to get the size of your image. Make a new file in GIMP with those dimensions.

Using the Rectangle Select select the foreground in your first picture from the horizon down. Press Ctrl+C to copy it. In your new document create a new layer. Go to Layer>New Layer… and then Ctrl+V to paste in the bottom portion of your new image. Repeat by selecting the sky from your second image and paste it as a new layer below.
Each layer should look something like this:

You’ll notice there’s a little something missing from the foreground above the horizon.
So why not use one of the other selection tools and cut out the sea spray as well? At first I tried this and I realised pretty quickly why it looked so wrong - the sky showing through the spray belongs to a much lighter sky giving it an ugly superimposed look. Here’s how wrong it looks:

To do that I used Select by Colour to pick out the sky and remove it, leaving the spray colour behind. It’s obviously really fake. The water has been lit by a much brighter sky and it’s given it a very obvious line on the horizon.

Instead I’m going to use the Clone Tool to copy some of the spray above the horizon.

Select the Clone Tool and choose a suitable brush. I’m using a speckled brush to imitate the pattern of the spray.
First move your mouse over the area you want to clone from. I’ve placed it on the white area of the wave. Hold Control and click on the area. Now move your cursor again to the area where you want to colour and paint as normal. You’ll notice two cursors which are in tandem. The first shows the area you’re cloning from, so be sure not to go outside of that area or you’ll end up painting rocks in the sky.
If you need to readjust where you’re cloning from just Ctrl+click on a new area and begin painting again.

You can remove some of your cloning with the Eraser Tool to thin the spray so that more of the sky shows through.
To finish use the Crop Tool again to remove any areas of blank canvas.

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A while back I wanted to make a decal for my MacBook. The idea was to make an octopus that would sit on top of my laptop with some tentacles curving around the screen area.

I began with a pencil drawing. I roughly marked out the edge of the screen on paper as well as a void area where the corner was and figured out roughly how the octopus’ tentacles would work. Then I sketched out the octopus using my markers as a guide and scanned it.

My pen scrawls are not pretty, so the first thing to do was remove them. Opening the image in GIMP I used the Eraser Tool to remove the lines and the page creases to clean up the image so I could work on it more easily. I left some of the paper texture so I could give the octopus a distressed texture but you might want to get rid of all of it.
You can see there that the pen lines intersect some of the pencilled area so after erasing the pen some of the pencil lines will have to be put back in.

Here’s how the image looks after some minor cleaning.

I wanted to keep this image so I could go back and make changes if needed so I made a copy and placed it on a new layer above and called it “Outline”. It’s not a true outline yet because the white background of the paper is still present. To get rid of this, use Select by Colour to select the pencil colour and then Select>Invert to to invert the selection and press Delete to get rid of the white area. On this occasion doing it this way rather than just selecting the background colour worked best but depending on how your image scans in you may find you can just select the background colour.
Here’s how the “Outline” layer looks:

To start adding colour I made a new layer below “Outline” and began colouring using the paintbrush tool. You’ll find having the above Outline layer visible helps at this stage! To blur the lines between the two colours I used Smudge . I’ll show you how it looks with and without the outline below:

When you scan a pencil drawing it tends to look really washed out or else the line is dark but the paper is also dark. I find it easy to start with a light image and darken the lines later if needed. To darken the Outline layer go to Colour>Hue/Saturation… and reduce the lightness.
You’ll find that darkening the pencil lines really enhances it. Here you can see the difference. I’ve also added some texture to the colour with a speckled brush and a slightly darker shade. You could Bucket Fill with a texture or pattern if you had something less hand-drawn in mind.
Parts of the octopus, like around the curve of the head, are too sketchy for my liking so to add more definition I made a new layer above “Outline” and using the Eye Dropper Tool I selected the pencil colour and drew in additional lines and shading. It can be difficult to match the pencil size and strength so you may find you need to experiment a bit before it blends with your original pencil lines. A little bit more definition makes all the difference:

That looks almost ready to me. Now to finish cleaning up the image use a Mask Layer to white-out everything but the octopus.

Make a new layer at the top and colour the entire layer white (or the colour of your choice) - this will be your background colour. If you skip this step and have a transparent layer you won’t be able to see your mask. Choose Layer>Mask>Add Layer Mask and choose White (Full Opacity). The mask colours everything the colour of the layer, except the areas where you paint. Think of it like this; it’s like placing a piece of paper on top of your drawing. To see the drawing below you need to cut out an area to let it show through. That’s what we’ll be doing next.

For clean lines we’ll blank out everything but the shape of the octopus below.
First select your drawing. I found the Scissors Select Tool does a really nice job of this. Making sure you’re still on your new Layer Mask layer, choose a starting point on the outline of your image and then click along the outline to make the selection. The tool automatically fills in the edges between each node:

Once you’ve selected the image, press Enter to confirm the selection. Now use the Bucket Fill Tool to fill in the selection. Any colour is ok since this is just a mask and won’t show in the final image. You can be fancy and change the opacity or just go for full opacity if you simply want to cut it out. Now when you’re happy with the mask go to Layer>Mask>Apply Layer Mask to complete it.

You should now have your completed image!

Now for the decal. You’ll need to acquire some printable vinyl available from specialist photo paper suppliers. The vinyl will either have an adhesive or will cling statically - probably the better option for a MacBook decal. Check which side is printable and if needed flip your image so it prints out as intended. All that remains to be done is to print and cut out your image. Done!

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I happen to think Infrared photography is pretty cool though I realise it’s not to everyone’s tastes. Since I work in digital and don’t own an Infrared filter I wanted to create an Infrared-like effect.

So to start open up your photograph in GIMP. This is the file I’ll be working with.

Distorting the colours is really easy. Open up the Hue/Saturation/Lightness menu, Colours>Hue-Saturation… and play around with the hue until you get some colours you like. I chose to shift the hue to 180 and pushed the saturation right up to accentuate the colours. If you wanted something subtler you could keep the saturation closer to the middle of the slider.

I could leave it there but I don’t really like myself with green hair. Purple suited me much better. And looking at the photograph I like the sepia quality to my clothes and camera so I’m going to match my head and hands with my clothing.

More recent versions of GIMP come with the coolest selection tool - Foreground Select.
Here’s how:

Zoom right into the area you’ll be working on; if you try zooming out half way through you’ll lose your selection and will have to start over. Choose the Foreground Select Tool and start roughly marking out the area you want to select using the lasso cursor. You don’t need to be too careful with this but try to avoid crossing into areas you don’t want to select (the foliage in this case). When you’re finished you’ll have a large coloured area. Now use the brush cursor to select any areas you missed with the lasso. It will automatically select areas of similar colour nearby.

Picture shows after lassoeing but before tidying it up with the brush.

Press Enter to view your selection.

If you’ve missed anything you can repeat the process. Just make sure the Add to Selection button has been selected.

I probably could have selected that a bit better but you get the idea. I had to redo this for the tutorial so I got a bit lazy. I’d also recommend not saving it as a jpg until you’re done or you’ll have hideous pixelation like I had.

Anyway, now to make my head match with my clothes I’m going to apply a sepia tone. For this go to Colours>Colourise and slide the Hue slider around until you get something orange-brown in colour. Play around with it and see if you need to reduce the saturation.

And here’s how it looks when you’ve selected and coloured all the parts.

If you want to have a go with this particular photo you can download it.

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