Image Restoration IV

Once the colors are corrected I went in to do any 'spotting' or cleaning up of blemishes. An unforeseen problem with retouching the work in Overspray, was not being able to use Photoshop's dust and scratches filter, which normally would have been a simple process. But airbrush art is composed of tiny paint speckles which would be mistaken by the filter as dust particles, thus causing over-smoothing, and robbing the illustration of its snap. So all spotting needed to be done by hand.

The before and after images here are easier to study when magnified

Image Restoration III

I then adjusted the overall levels of the cyan channel, bringing the shadow slider up to where the darkest shadow detail remained in the image. This usually gives you an indication of whether an image still retains enough information to work with.

So now it's possible to see a wider range of hues. There's a little green in the glass, and the outer outline ring of the circle is a similar color. The skin tones in the hand are also looking much better. Dave usually uses very bright colors, so I can tell that the original didn't look this somber originally. My hunch is that the outer ring should be blue-green along with parts of the glass, and perhaps the fill color within the circle should be a bit less green.

It's become apparent that I'll need to adjust portions of the illustration separately, then merge them together into a single image. The 3rd image has had the cyan increased, and shows the parts that didn't need more blue being erased. This is repeated for every element that needs individualized tweaking - maybe 5-6 components.

Image Restoration II

This caused the image to become oversaturated, so I reduced that a bit as well.

Now I could tell what shape the overall color was in. It was instantly obvious that the blues had faded quite severely, so I opened up the cyan channel to see how it looked.

Eek!

Image Restoration

The most time consuming portion of assembling Overspray was ensuring that all the paintings were in good shape and ready for print. As some pieces are nearly 40 years old, they required a bit of help in the retouching department. Dave Willardson had done an excellent job of archiving all of his work onto 4x5 transparencies which we sent to Singapore for drum scanning. But even so there were still a few that required restoration work.

This is what the original transparency looks like. Pretty severe fading, probably due to improper finishing during film processing. But this illustration is one of my favorite early pieces by Dave and I wanted to include it.

The first step was to remove the overall color cast that had been caused by the fading. I could tell the background was once white, so I reduced the red cast until it was neutral, and adjusted the shadow levels.

Topics

Feel free to request information on any aspect of the book. I'll be happy to discuss the artists, 70s illustration, airbrush technique, the image retouching undertaken for the book etc.