King of Kings - Low Freqency Retouching

[cathodeRay]

OK, here we go again. The image below is of the Colossi of Memnon (Wikipedia) which I wrongly called Ozymandias by way of Shelley's King of Kings. The image is about as bad as can be: faded over time and/or underexposed at the time, subject to a nasty cast, and even worse it looks like the Starship Enterprise is trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to beam the right hand statue up. This post is chiefly about how to get rid of those three vertical bars of light contamination on the right.

Given the blemishes are clearly in the low frequency range, and the statue detail in the high frequency range, it seemed to me this was a classic candidate for Frequency Separation and/or Wavelet Decomposition. Isolate the LF layer, do the correction, and re-assemble, job done. Only all my attempts so far have not produced satisfactory results. The point where things get most interesting is in the lower half, where the aim is to preserve all the texture, but remove the wrong colours.

More generally this could be seen as a question of how to transfer colour information from one area to another while leaving the texture (and luminosity) intact. Certainly I come up across this general problem quite often, so a working fix would be very useful. None of the standard retouching brushes work for me. And I would also like to avoid using masking, and instead use a painting on a layer method - I find it so much more controllable. What I am also saying here is the method doesn't have to be Frequency Separation/Wavelet Decomposition, though to me they are the obvious candidates, so long as the method works and preferably is layer and painting/brush based (and keeps to the non-destructive mantra).

Ozymandias.jpg

So, which method is King for the King of Kings - Frequency Separation, Wavelet Decomposition or something else entirely? Any thoughts/ideas as ever gratefully received.

cathodeRay

[Martin Huber]

I tried to enhance the image, but didn't do frequency separation. Instead I tried to remove the problems of the image step by step:
- Remove the color cast by a Color Correction layer
- This revealed a too large saturation at the right edge of the ground (or too less at the left). This is reduced by a Hue/Saturation layer.
- The stripes in the ground are reduced by another Hue/Saturation layer.
- The gray trees are colored by a Hue editor layer.
- I didn't like the sky, so I replaced it
- And finally I added a bit contrast and sharpness.

Result.jpg

Result.pld.zip

Martin

[cathodeRay]

Martin - Great result and thanks for uploading the file so we can see how you did it.

I notice a lot of the correction seems to happen in the first layer (Color Correction) with your manual settings. As an experiment I tried the Automatic button with and without Fix Whitepoint and got a good result as well. It seemed to me that maybe Color Correction > Automatic (with and without the eyedropper) may be White Point 'with knobs on', ie is does the same as White Point, but unlike White Point it also has colour sliders so the result can be tweaked, whereas White Point is more of a take it or leave it (or try again, clicking on a different grey/white spot) approach, so far as the correction is concerned. Color Correction (Automatic) also gives you some feedback, in that it tells you what corrections it has applied.

I also note the use of the HSV Hue channel (in the Hue Editor) as a global shift, using a mask to target the trees. One of the great things I like about the Hue Editor is that you can also click to place static points ie colours you don't want to change, in effect an invisible colour based quasi-mask, with usually subtle and pleasing colour shifts. Good to learn another technique though, using a standard mask and a global hue shift.

Yes, the sky was horrible, makes sense to replace it. Doing that also totally solves the stripes in the sky problem.

cathodeRay

[katymelo]

You've done a hugh work! I think you can even take part in a photo-contest, for example in this one - https://damagedphotorestoration.com/blo ... rizes.html