In this tutorial, we'll take an in-depth look at restoring an old torn photograph. Restoring old family photos is something that you can do for your relatives and bring tears to their eyes, and yes this is a service you can offer to clients as well. Let's take a look at a professional workflow for restoring old photographs to their former glory.

1. Introduction

When deciding on which picture to use for this tutorial, I encountered the lack of material I could use in public. The picture provided is a family photo sent to me in a terrible scan resolution. But the picture was just the kind of picture I found right for this kind of tutorial. And the end result also shows that you actually can work on poor scanned pictures and get reasonably good results.
The print size is of course limited due to this. That said. The importance with this tutorial is guiding you through the workflow process. There are some important steps, however, you must keep in mind, but never hesitate to be creative and explore different approaches. The steps to follow are:

1. Make a copy of the original to work from
2. Adjust the dimension you need and crop the image so you don't work on areas you don't need.
3. Retouch/restore areas in the image as needed.
4. Remove noise or unwanted patterns
5. Adjust highlights shadows and neutrals (in color photos you would also adjust skin color)
6. Adjust the brightness and contrast
7. Sharpen

Step 1

And now for the workflow and tutorial. In Step 1 I have already specified dimensions and cropped the image. You would then go about the restoration. I always start out in photos like this with the patch tool and get larger areas roughly patched. Then I get more specific and change between the Patch Tool, the Healing Tool, and the Clone Tool as suited. I'll explain in more detail in the next steps.

Step 2

The Patch Tool works just as the Marquee Tool in regards to behavior. You drag a selection around the area you want to fix, then you click in the middle of your selection, and whilst holding the mouse button down, you drag the selection to another location in the picture with similarities and let go. Be sure to align your selection before you let it go. See next step and watch the alignment.

Step 3

Watch alignment in the shades of the curtain in the background. Do all larger areas in the picture. This tool not only works great, but it's also a timesaver and a good way to start your restoration.

Step 4

After getting all the larger areas done change to the Healing Brush Tool (see corresponding red color in the picture below) and Clone Stamp Tool. As you work on your picture always feel free to experiment with these tools. If you are concerned with an efficient workflow, it's good to get the grasp of these three tools.
Note that the Spot Healing Tool is also a tool you would use where, as its name suggests, there are spots. It works by just clicking on the spots you want to remove and I find myself using this often in some pictures where there are spots scattered around in the image. The workflow would then be to start out with the Spot Healing Brush, then changing between this and the Healing Brush Tool. In this picture, I had no need for it though.
As the picture below suggest, I use the Clone Stamp Tool at the edges of the picture. The Healing Brush Tool and the Patch Tool will usually create some effects you don't want when you work towards the edges of a picture. Just try it out and you'll see what I mean. Again, just change between the tools and feel free to experiment between them until you get your desired result.

Step 5

Here we have done the first part of the restoration.

Step 6

And now for the serious defections in our picture. Here we’ll use the man’s right eye to substitute his missing left eye. Just draw a rough marquee selection around his right eye, and then hit Command + J to jump the layer (copy the selection to a new layer).

Step 7

Then hit Command + T to enter the Free Transform Tool.

Step 8

Right-click inside the selection and hit Flip Horizontal.

Step 9

At this point, when you drag the selection over to where the left eye should be, you would want to lower the Opacity and align the eye with what's left of his torn away eye behind your new layer. When you have it aligned, hit enter or hit the mark I've placed the green circle around (shown below) to commit the changes. Then raise the Opacity to 100% again.

Step 10

Now, with the layer selected hit the mask-button (as indicated by the green circle below) too apply a mask.

Step 11

Now we want to paint with black in the mask to hide the areas we don't need or don't want to see. When using masks the rule is: white reveals and black conceals. If you need soft transitions, use gray. A good way to paint away areas in your selection is to lower the opacity of your brush, then sweep across the areas you want to get rid of until you have the transition result between the two layers you would want.
Bonus Tip: Keep your finger at the X button to flip between black and white. It's always good to go back and forth like this in smaller areas until you get what you want. The D key will make your foreground and background colors black and white if the colors are set to something different than black and white. If you want to see only the mask on your screen to smoothen out the areas, hold down the Alt key and click the mask.

Step 12

Now you want to do the same process with the ear. Depending on the picture you would try out different free transform modes you also could use. For the ear I did use warp. I also did a minor part from the hairline at the man's right side, rotated , and scaled it slightly just to get a better start for the missing hairline. Then I cloned where needed.

If you look at my layers here, don't be confused. The "retouch" layer is the next step, but when doing the picture I didn't decide on the hairline right away. The layer called "Layer 1" is the hairline layer.

Step 13

After getting all the larger parts into place, I went back to the Clone Tool and touched up all the edges I needed to fix. This is what I put on its own layer; the "retouch" layer. Usually you want the Opacity on the Clone Tool set down so you get better control over the cloning and can do them in more than one sweep. Just drag over the area until you get the result you desire. Command + Z is of course something you want to keep your fingers at during the whole of this process.

Step 14

Often when you go about doing the last retouching, you would use different layers for different parts. If you don't want a lot of layers, just merge them down when you are satisfied. I usually do small parts on different layers and merge them back to one "retouch" layer, but never merge these basic layers.
You don't want to merge everything together if you later see something you didn't spot right away. It's always good to be able to go back and delete only the "retouch" layer, and fix that, or the eye-layer, if you found something out of place in it, and so on.

Step 15

So now the restoration part is done.

Step 16

The next thing I do is to select all the layers and group them. Command + G. Then I make a new layer from this group. Command + Shift + Alt + E and rename it "noise." This layer is for our noise reduction. One thing I want to point out, which I probably haven't mentioned.
As you can see from my layers below I've kept the original file in the PSD as the background layer, and then turned it off. I like to keep the original file together with my PSD file, so I always start by jumping this (Command + J). This way I get an exact copy to work from, then turn of the background.
Bonus Tip: If you hold the Alt key down while clicking on the eye in front of the background image, you turn this layer on and all the other layers off. Click again to turn this layer off, and all the others on. Good for quick comparisons.

Step 17

Now we remove noise in the image. Noise reduction is done in various ways, but here I use the Reduce Noise filter found under Noise. I exaggerated the noise reduction a little for this tutorial, and believe my original numbers were 8 for the strength and about 20 for detail.
Another tip here is to go into the Advanced Dialogue and crank the strength up to full in the blue channel with 0 on details. In the red channel you crank also the strength up high with some detail, and leave the red channel with no alterations. This lets the red channel keep some of the details in the picture without blurring it too much. This technique I got from Taz Tally, and is what you also would want to do to remove patterns or scan lines.

Step 18

After noise reductions we would go on to sharpening. Sharpening is another big topic, but a common use, and a good one, is the High Pass Sharpening. When you apply the High Pass filter, you would want to use low settings.
For this tutorial, I have raised the values a bit too much, and you would want to see less in the gray picture than here. The edges are what you want to sharpen. There are also some technical issues you want to keep in mind.
When you sharpen for print, you always want to over-sharpen a little on screen. Printers have a natural way to blur out pictures a little. When you have applied the High Pass filter you would set the Blending Mode to Overlay or Soft Light. I usually make use of a little over sharpen anyhow, and then lower the value by using the opacity control.

Bonus Tip: Often you would want to sharpen only areas of the picture. In the example picture below, I've made a mask and painted away everything but the face, so this is the only part that gets sharpened. Often this technique is used for only the eyes.
The technique works also well using curves to lighten or darken areas of the picture. If you only want the eyes lighter, you would make a curves layer, hit Command + I to invert the mask, making the mask go black, and paint back with white where the eyes are, and so on. It's quicker to invert the mask than starting to paint away everything you don't want.

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Step 19

In this final step, I did adjust the contrast with an s-curve. This step I didn't make use of in my original file, and you would probably want to do it before the sharpening, but I added it here just to get a more complete workflow overview, since that is the nature of this tutorial. I often make use of Command + Shift + Alt + E to make a new layer from the layers below, and that's what I would have done here.
I would have put the "curves" layer over the "noise" layer, then merging all the layers below to a new layer on top. Next sharpen this with the High Pass filter, keeping the curves layer intact, just in case I wanted to go back and adjust the last two steps.

2. Conclusion

So this was a the whole process of restoring an old, torn photograph. But keep in mind that a lot of these steps can be explored in greater depth. Always experiment and look for things you could add to your workflow to get an even better result.

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Preview of Final Results

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Stock Photos

Here is the stock photo used for this tutorial. You can download the image through Dreamstime by clicking on the image below. We used the highest resolution (unscaled) images available to write this tutorial. If you would like to follow this tutorial using the same settings we used, download the highest resolution (unscaled) images available.

IMPORTANT: When working with any image in Photoshop, always play things on the cautious side and make new layers for everything. This way, if you make a mistake, you won’t have to start all over, but you might just have to re-do one layer, possibly saving you hours of work. Everything in this tutorial should be done on separate layers.

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Step 1 – Create a new Document

Create a new document. 1920px in width and 1200px in height. This is a standard large wallpaper size.

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Step 2 – Invert it to black

Press (control/command + I) to invert the white to black.

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Step 3 – Open the image of the Mountain

Load the image of the mountain into Photoshop. To do this, choose File > Open, browse for the file, then click OK. Before you do any selecting, scale down the image (Image > Image Size…) to a 1920px width, and let the height auto adjust to match. For this tutorial, I didn’t want to use the whole image, but instead, about only half of it (600px in height). So, in the picture below, you can see that I selected a portion of the mountain that I wanted using the marquee tool.

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Step 4 – Put the mountains in the new document

Alright, so with that portion of the mountains selected, copy it (control/command + C) and paste it into your new document. You’re going to want it in the upper half of the document, so this is super easy if you turn on your photoshop grid, and you can let Photoshop snap the mountains above the 600px mark for height.

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Step 5 – Turn off Grid / Name Layer

Turn off the grid. Name this layer “mountain”.

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Step 6 – Darken Mountains

Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and put the brightness to the lowest setting, and the contrast to the highest setting.

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Step 7 – Duplicate Layer

The quickest way to do this is to type (control/command + J). The new layer will be called mountain copy.

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Step 8 – Flip the Mountains upside down

Press (control/command + T). This will allow you to left click (with your mouse) and select “Flip Vertical”. The following images are a before and after.

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Step 9 – Move the Mountains to the bottom

If you are still in the control/command + T view, then you will be able to click and drag the flipped mountains to the bottom of the document, and they should snap when you get it to the right spot. Click enter to exit this mode when you’re done moving it.

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Step 10 – Create a Mask

In your layers menu, select the 3rd button to the right (the white circle inside a gray rectangle icon) to create a mask, and using your gradient tool, create a black to transparent gradient from the bottom of the document to about 600px (the midline where the two mountain halves mirror each other.)

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Step 12 – Checkpoint

If you’ve done your mask correctly, you will have arrived at something like this.

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Step 13 – Add some Blue

Create a new Layer (Layer > New > Layer). Select the bottom of the document. A good way to do this is quickly and accurately is to select the “mountain copy” layer because you know that it is half of the screen. To do this, go into your layers palette, select the layer “mountain copy” (control/command + click on the icon for the layer “mountain copy”). 
Note: If you cannot seem to select the layer by clicking on it, you are probably clicking the wrong thing. To the left of the layer name, there is a small icon of the layer. You should control/command + click on that image, not the text itself. 
Select a blue for your foreground (I choose #216a82) and black for your background, and create a gradient. Set the opacity for this layer to 50%.

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Step 14 – Lens Flare

Create another new layer (Layer > New > Layer), and call it “lens flare”. Fill this layer with black using the fill tool (G), and then head up to Filters > Render > Lens Flare. Select 105mm Prime, and leave the brightness at 100%. Then center the lens flare as best you can (if you miss the center you can always undo and try again, or just move it using the move (V) tool)0.

Using these settings you should get this:

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Step 15 – Up the Contrast

Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and move the contrast to the highest level possible.

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Step 16 – Colorize

Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and move the mimic the settings below.

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Step 17 – Checkpoint

Just look at your layers palette and make sure that your layers are like this (order and number of layers should be the same as this). Then, set the blending mode for the layer “lens flare” to linear dodge (add).

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Step 18 – Another Lens Flare

Duplicate the Layer (control/command + J) and press (control/command + T). Shrink the height and expand the width of this flare to either side (try to copy the picture below).

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Step 19 – Blur It

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and apply a blur of about 7px.

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Step 20 – Center It

Move the flattened and elongated lens flare up to the center line.

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Step 21 – Center Gradient

Create a new layer (Layer > New > Layer), and select your gradient tool. Choose the reflected gradient option, and using a blue foreground (I used #216a82), create a foreground to transparent gradient from the center. To do this correctly, you will want to start in the center and click and drag to either the top or the bottom. When you’re done, se this layer to 50% opacity.

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Step 22 – Creating the Grid! — A

Create a new layer (Layer > New > Layer), and set the background to black (this is so you can see what you’re doing… DO NOT put anything on this layer in later steps besides the black color that is already there!). Press (U) and select the rounded rectangle tool. Set the radius to 50 px. Also make sure that you’re on paths, not shapes.

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Step 23 – Creating the Grid! — B

Holding shift to ensure that your drawing perfect squares, create a rounded rectangle like the one below.

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Step 24 – Creating the Grid! — C

Create a new layer (Layer > New > Layer), name it “grid”, and make white your foreground color. Right click in the box and select fill path.

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Step 25 – Creating the Grid! — D

You should see this. Then click (shift + H) to hide the path.

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Step 26 – Creating the Grid! — E

Select the layer contents (instructions on how to do this are on step 13)

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Step 27 – Creating the Grid! — F

Go to Select > Modify > Contract, and choose 25px. If your squares are a little smaller or larger than mine, and this doesn’t look good with these settings, than adjust as necessary.

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Step 28 – Creating the Grid! — G

Click OK. Man, that was an easy step!

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Step 29 – Creating the Grid! — H

Click backspace/delete to get the middle out of there. If necessary, deselect after this. Haha, that was easy too!

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Step 30 – Creating the Grid! — I

Duplicate this layer, and move the new layer to the right. Hit (control/command + E) to merge the layers, and then repeat. Do the same in a vertical direction, until you have 3 columns and 4 rows like below. Make sure all your squares are on one layer when your done (but not on that black layer that we’ve already talked about in Letter A).

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Step 31 – Move the Grid

Hit (V) and move the grid to the bottom half and center it.

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Step 32 – Make a Copy

Duplicate this grid layer and turn off the visibility for now.

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Step 33 – Perspective

Hit (control/command + T) and right click to perspective.

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Step 34 – Perspective

Move the top corners inward slightly, and move the bottom out to either side. You only have to do this on one half of the grid, because perspective will mimic whatever you do on the other side.

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Step 35 – Turn off Visibility

Hide the visibility for the black layer that we made at the start of all of this grid madness. Now that you can see again, you might want to move your grid down a bit so that it looks nice.

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Step 36 – Turn on Visibility

Go to the layer “grid copy” that we turned off earlier, and turn it back on. Click (control/command + T) and shrink it (holding shift so that it doesn’t get distorted) like you see below.

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Step 37 – Copy It

Just like we did earlier, copy the layer “grid copy” and move it over and down (hitting control/command + E along the way to speed things up), and you will eventually get a big grid like the one below (make sure that it is all on the same layer “grid copy” at the end). Move the grid to the bottom half and center it just like before.

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Step 38 – Perspective

Same as step 33 and 34, just make sure that the perspective looks the same as it does with the larger grid. You will probably have to go out wider on the bottom for this one.

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Step 39 – Color

Double click on the layer “grid copy” apply the color overlay effect as seen below. When you’ve done this, do the same to layer “grid”.

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Step 40 – Opacity

Then set the opacity of both layers “grid” and “grid copy” (both blue now) to 25% opacity.

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Step 41 – Text

Using a font of your choice, although I strongly recommend an outline font like I used, type either TRON, or AEVION, or whatever you want inside there, and center it.

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Step 42 – Text

Go to Filter > Pixelate > Fragment.

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Step 43 – Text Glow

Double click on the text layer, and set the blending options to what you see below.

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Step 44 – Checkpoint

You should see something like this now.

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Step 45 – Lens Flare

If you don’t have one of these like I did looking back at my old layers palette, make a duplicate of the flattened lens flare (“lens flare copy”). Move it to the bottom of the text like you see below.

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Step 46 – Text Reflection — A

Duplicate the text layer. Hit (control/command + T), and right click to flip the text upside down (vertical).

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Step 47 – Text Reflection — B

Move it down like you see below, so that it looks like a reflection.

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Step 48 – Text Reflection — C

Move the reflection layer below “layer 1″, or whatever layer name you have that has a blue gradient on it. Set the reflection layer’s opacity to 50%.

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Step 49 – Finishing Touches — A

Go back and find your original and upright text layer. Turn on the visibility of that black layer (if you deleted it, just make another, and put it right underneath the text layer) and put it underneath the text layer. Click on the text layer in your palette, and then hit (control/command + E) to merge the layers. You should see this below:

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Step 50 – Finishing Touches — B

Set the blending mode for this layer to “linear dodge (add)”. Then your text should really glow. And then you’re done.

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Step 51 – Conclusion

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of the tutorial! I hope you understood what was going on, and enjoyed learning about this effect as much as I did teaching it. I encourage you to keep playing around with this effect, practice the techniques, and try to improve on areas here and there that you think could use improvement. It is all up to you as the artist — good luck! 
Below are two versions of this finished effect that I’ve done.

Download the PSD (25 MB)

Read more at http://www.photoshoptutorials.ws/photoshop-tutorials/text-effects/tron-grid/#Ff5juMKIV6PeEyxG.99

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