My first major repair job...

[Grumby]

While on holidays over Christmas, I found this lovely old lighthouse. Sadly, the local spray can gang had paid a visit shortly after the lighthouse was given a new coat of paint, so I knew I had some repair work to do once I got the picture home to my PC.



Before and after...

Once I opened it up at full resolution, I realised that I also had some fairly substantial dust issues, as well as the lighthouse looking more like the leaning tower of Pisa. So into Photoshop and off I went...

Step 1 - Underpinning the foundations.
This wasn't too difficult to do - I alway have the rulers visible, which allows me to drag a horizontal or vertical guide into the image for just this purpose. I pulled in a vertical guideline to the middle, and then just rotated the entire image CCW 5 degrees. Too much, so the went back the other way 1 degree at a time, until it was lined up. The lightning conductor at the top made a good reference line, but there was also a line of rivets to follow, and lighthouses are fairly symetrical anyway.

Step 2 - A little light dusting
Well, the first thing I did was actually cleaned the dust out of the camera sensor, THEN I started on the photo Mostly a case of using the good old patch tool, though there were one or two specks that crossed colour boundaries and needed careful selection of source material to be able to match.

Step 3 - A new coat of paint
When you are taking a patch of white and trying to use the patch or spot repair tools over black grafitti, it just doesn't work. You end up with a grey blur - very annoying. My method was to attack the grafitti in 2 stages, firstly by cutting and pasting similarly coloured areas over the black paint. The rivets were a royal pain - the angle of the lines of rivets change as you go up, so matching sections often involved minute rotations as well. Anyway, the end result was a patchwork affair of slightly varying colours, but the rivets all lined up pretty well. There was one section of grafitti on the left where a band of rivets goes round horizontally, where I just couldn't get in there and clean it up, so I cut the same area from the right hand side, flipped it, and pasted it in place. It was much too blue, so a little experimenting with the levels, hue/saturation, and brightness/contrast got it matching pretty well.

The next phase was to get rid of the patchwork, and blend the colouring. This was done with repeated use of the patch and spot repair tools at fairly high resolution, so I could concentrate on swathes of colour and work around the individual rivets. I chose to leave them whatever colour they happened to be, wherever I sourced them from - they would be more liable to colour variations in reality, and when printed at 4"x6", they won't show anyway.

Step 4 - Trim and tidy
The last step, was to crop the slightly rotated image back into squared off frame. Being a vertical subject, I chose to crop to 6"x4" at 300dpi for printing, and this just about managed to take in the top and bottom and allowed me to centre the lighthouse.

Next steps, now I've cleaned up the lighthouse, will be to remove the back end of the car, and also the stay wire for the telegraph pole that is just out of shot - though its getting late, so perhaps I'll just make it 3" wide instead of 4" and lose them that way...

I know it's all pretty basic stuff, but I hope it gives someone the courage to take what they know is going to be a bad photo, in the hope that it can be salvaged later.

Cheers,
Grumby

[Geoscape]

Great work and lovely subject. TFS

[BabetteKD]

Great repair job! I hate when people deface things before anyone can appreciate the sight. They'll regret it someday :\

I love the detail you put into the steps as well.

[DanielF]

Thanks for sharing your technique. Really nice work! I hope my PS skills can get to this level one day!

[drr0b]

It may be basic, but it's very effective- great work!

I'm new here, so is it bad form to ask how long it took?

[Grumby]

Originally Posted by drr0b

It may be basic, but it's very effective- great work!

I'm new here, so is it bad form to ask how long it took?

Many thanks for the compliments (everybody).
LOL - No, it's not bad form at all. The whole point of this particular section is sharing...
I'm embarassed to say I spent nearly 3 hours on this BUT, that's mainly because I was experimenting with different techniques (I'm fairly new to Photoshop still - like I said, this was my first major repair job), working zoomed right in at a small scale, and I'm also a bit of a perfectionist. Once I knew what my approach was going to be, probably only about half that time was actually doing the work. But at the end of the day, the more effort you put in, the better the result you'll get out...

Grumby

[Erica.P]

Good work. It is always a shame to see grafitti on such beautiful structures.

Erica