Removing weird spots from old photo

[Torbjorn]

Hi, I've been trying to remove the weird spots on the guy to the far left on this image, but for some reason I can't seem to get them away without messing up the rest of the photo. I was looking for a quick and easy fix, but do I need to take the hard way with patching, cloning and brushing?

[Geoff F]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! No easy solution and the hard way is going to be very hard!

Not much to work from when you get to his arm. The only thing I can suggest is to work on clearing the small and easier areas first to give you a bit of source material to clone from.

Sometimes when attempting items like this for my local history society I manage to clone from another person but even that isn't an option here.

[dje]

Here is a quick and dirty attempt using mainly cloning with a small radius stamp and a little bit of spot healing.

Not much to work from when you get to his arm. The only thing I can suggest is to work on clearing the small and easier areas first to give you a bit of source material to clone from.

Yes that's the way I approached it Geoff.

[kazuyar]

just as an experiment to see if it could be done quickly i roughly cut out the spots then clicked fill/ content aware in photoshop, i then quickly cloned a line up the front of his coat from his leg
it didnt take longer than a minute and with a bit of touching up it wouldnt be too bad i don't think

[Round Tuit]

Hi,
I don't think that there are any easy solutions to your problem. Having said that, I have at time had success in reducing the brownish stain on old black and white photos by using a channel mixer adjustment layer to add the best of the three channels and substract the worst one to create a new black and white image. You might have to play with the proportions of each channel but sometimes the stain disappears completely. Most of the time you will still have to touch up the resulting image but the job should be much easier.

Best of luck,

André

P.S. Here is a quick sample of this method followed by a bit of local contrast enhancement. You would still need to do the final cloning and healing.

[Torbjorn]

Thank you all for your help and advice! And sorry for taking time to get back and respond to all your advice. :-)

I ended up doing a lot of clone stamp, healing brush, dodging, patching and mumbling. And here is the result. Think I did an OK job with it in the end.

[dje]

Good job in tidying it up. The colour seems to have changed a bit with a slightly green tinge. That may be your desired look of course.

Dave

[Saorsa]

Hi, I've been trying to remove the weird spots on the guy to the far left on this image, but for some reason I can't seem to get them away without messing up the rest of the photo. I was looking for a quick and easy fix, but do I need to take the hard way with patching, cloning and brushing?

Are you quite sure they are not a part of the event. He seems very surprised while the lady in the white shawl seems to have flicked something from her bag at him.

Another possibility is that he got the egg that hadn't been boiled properly.