Vanishing point, repair a missing peice of a photo

posted by nezbitten, Oct 23, 2007 1:10 PM — 2 comments

Firstly it’s a good idea to de-saturate or greyscale the image before starting. If you wish to end up with a sepia tone at the end, then we can apply a photo filter to colourise the image when we have finished.



Let’s look at what we have to do. Invent a window and rebuild the boards and sky.



Using the vanishing point filter, draw a grid that matches the perspective of the boards and house, notice the boards converge to the left, so the grid must follow these converging lines. Get familiar with the tools on palette, we will be using the clone tone with heal off.
Start with the window. Using the clone tool clone the vertical sides of the window frame upwards. Until you reach what would be a good height for a sash window.





Swap back to normal photo shop window. Repair the right had corner of lower section. Using the selection tool make a selection around the corner section of the lower pane, top left corner. Feather the selection by 1.5 pixels and then cut and paste. Flip horizontally and rotate slightly to become the mended corner.

Now we have a full lower pane we can use for the top half. Select just the pane from the newly complete lower window with the selection tool. Feather again, cut and past. Position the new upper pane in place where it looks most natural. Now dirty the pane slightly by dodging back the highlights with a soft large brush. Now we need to add the top of the window. Select the window sill minus the shadow under it, feather and cut/paste. Re-scale the sill to make a wooden beam for the top part of the window frame and position.

Now it’s down to you to add texture by using either the clone tool set to a low opacity and a small brush or the patch tool to grab some grain and texture from suitable wooden areas around to make the new wood work like it’s always been there. Assess the shadows under ledges to make sure they are all consistent with the look of the image and strength of the sun.

Swap back to vanishing point filter. Let’s fix the boards. In the original photo the boards to the right are significantly lighter than those to left, so when we clone them over we would have a house that looks spookily similar on both sides and not natural enough.




So although cloning them across is a good starting point, it might be better to use what we have on the right and clone the up and then borrow the texture and dark markings of those on the left to blend them in a bit. To blend over the texture from the right hand boards use a clone tool set to medium soft and around 50-70% opacity, vary this if the results do not look convincing. You can the use the same method to make sure the shadows between the boards look natural.




Finally when you have done with the boards just clone up the sky, select the bottom edge border of the photo and use it to make one at the top. Flatten the image and rotate and correct the perspective.

Done.

Neil

Proving a quality photo restoration service