Trial lesson for beginners. Retouching of one portrait. Features of retouching a photo for a monument Retouching a photo for a monument step by step tutorials

10.09.2021

To depict a portrait on a tombstone, you will need a photo of the deceased. But sometimes it happens that a photograph that relatives want to see on a memorial stele is badly damaged, or old and needs restoration, and you want to remember a dear person young, or captured at a certain moment in life. In this case the best way- turn to professionals. As a rule, large companies engaged in the manufacture of monuments and engraving portraits have trained specialists who, using digital tools, skillfully retouch any photo.

But if the picture does not require too complex professional processing, you can try to process the photo on the monument with your own hands using the Photoshop graphic editor.

Photo processing procedure:

Digitization

First of all, using the scanner, transfer the existing photo to the computer. The resolution of the photo should be specified from 600 dpi. Then open it in the editor.

pruning

You should find out in advance from the company where the engraving will be done, what size the image needs to be provided, and fit the image to it.

This can be done using the “Crop” tool (“Crop” in English versions), or by using the “Image” menu➛”Image Size”.

Contrast

Old photos often look quite dull, the “Levels” tool (“Image”➛”Correction”➛”Levels”) will help to cope with this.

In the window that opens, use the sliders to adjust the image to the desired contrast. In this case, it should be borne in mind that for a photo on ceramics, the picture should be light, for engraving - on the contrary, more contrasting.

Retouch

You can remove cracks, spots and small artifacts using the Stamp or Healing Brush tools - they transfer the image texture from the area you specified to the damaged one.

With the Alt key held down, click on an undamaged area with the mouse. Then adjust the brush size and “walk” over the defects. Use the smooth edges of the brush.

The work is quite complex and painstaking, so it is desirable to save intermediate satisfactory stages so that you can return to them if necessary.

Preservation

When the photo has acquired the desired look, it should be saved in the highest resolution allowed.

There are quite a few services on the Internet that offer retouching photos on a monument online, but they all come down to a simple online order form - an offer to send a picture and pay for retouching. It is impossible to prepare a photo for a monument online, as this is a very painstaking manual work.

Retouching on monuments - editing the original photographs (removing defects, making the image clear and artistic) using traditional or digital methods. We do photo retouching on the monument with their subsequent application on the stele.

Retouching a portrait on a monument takes place in several stages: scanning a photo, drawing a black background and a halo, smoothing the bottom edge, removing defects (dust particles, glare, cracks), adding brightness and contrast (giving clarity to the portrait). After the processing of the photo for engraving is completed, it is applied to the monument. Our masters perform these works manually or using a laser printer. An artistic background, clothing and other design elements can be chosen for the portrait.

Photo requirements for retouching

In order for the portrait to be as similar as possible to the original, the photograph must be of sufficient quality. It may be old (from the family archive), but with a clearly visible face. To retouch a portrait on a monument, you need to scan a paper photo yourself or bring the original to the office on the day the contract is signed (or in the next few days after).

Photo scan requirement:

resolution of at least 600 dpi
jpg, tif or psd format
selection of the scan area (so that the scan does not cover the entire surface of the scanner, but only the photo)

Note that the size of a paper photograph does not play a special role when properly scanned. For retouching on a monument, large portraits can be equally used, as well as photographs taken on documents.

What affects the quality of a photo for retouching?

1. Mobile mail. When sending a photo from your phone, it is often compressed by default. When enlarged to the required size, the portrait is blurred, which complicates the work of the retoucher and leads to a decrease in similarity with the original. It is better to send a photo from a computer.

2. Photos taken on the phone. Unfortunately, in the recent past, the cameras on the phone only allowed you to take a picture of a very small resolution. Such a photo is retouched only if there are no other better pictures.

Why do you need retouching on the monument?

Photo retouching for monuments is a necessary condition for applying a portrait on granite. The raw photo simply won't show up on the tombstone. Our artists do retouching based on the requirements of laser equipment. Our machines allow us to achieve maximum image clarity.

Retouching with curvature, and this is one of my many mistakes, unfortunately, I can not fix it yet. Of course, I don’t consider myself a master, but I really like to give lessons! Therefore, she could not deprive herself of such pleasure! Maybe I’m doing something wrong, I can’t deny it, but I got to everything myself, watched the video, somewhere I learned from my own mistakes.

1. The very first thing to do is to straighten the photo if it is crooked: double-click on the layer where there is a lock and it disappears. Then press CtrL T at the same time. Expand over the edge. But everyone understands, I hope.

2. The second thing that catches your eye in this photo is the uneven distribution of light. How to lighten darker areas? What is easier - I took a clarifier and lightened everything that is darker. Only with a clarifier in the same place we can walk two or three times, the similarity is lost! You can use a vector mask in this case.

3.Create a duplicate layer by pressing Ctrl J at the same time. And one more layer. It turned out three layers. The top layer is active. Apply the levels function to the active layer: image-correction-levels

4. In the levels, move the middle slider to the left so that the dark part of the face is lightened. Pay no attention to the light! Let her at least turn white!

And now the most important thing! At the bottom of the layers there is a so-called vector mask. Press the Alt key and this mask at the same time

5. It turned out such a black square near the top layer, and the image acquired its original form. Then take a white brush and paint over the dark areas of the face

I chose a brush with 60% opacity because when I did the levels, I lightened the dark part of the face too much. There you will not guess the first time. But in this case, you can fix the opacity of the brush. If something doesn’t suit you and you painted over with a white brush, switch the white color to black in the tools and swipe over the same place where you didn’t like it, and everything will be as it was before.

Press Ctrl without releasing, select the bottom layer. Now we have two layers selected. Right click - merge layers.

7. Then duplicate the layer with Ctrl J and apply either a filter-blur on the surface, or a filter-noise-reduce noise. If you have a Perfectum plugin, then it's better to use it, of course. But just keep in mind that this plugin can be used in RGB mode (image-mode-RGB), only then the plugin will be active!

A window popped up - do not merge layers!

Then another window will appear - "cancel and cancel". Click on "cancel"

8. Make a black vector mask as described above and use a white soft brush to paint over the areas of the skin where it is necessary to smooth it out. In those places where there are wrinkles, make the percentage of opacity lower. And where you need to leave sharpness, you can not use a brush.

9. Let's work with a mix brush and smooth out the bumps on the face that remain. Opacity 13 percent. You can’t mix with a brush at once in all places, clamped, only in each area of \u200b\u200bdifferent lighting, otherwise it will make everything gray for you.

10. The face more or less cleared up, but it became very blurry. We need to fix this urgently!

Duplicate the layer. Always duplicate layers so that later you can delete this layer and do it differently if it's bad. And then the story has a peculiarity to end at the most inopportune moment! Filter - sharpen - contour sharpness. Make it not very scary, the sharpness is not too steep. For example, I have 81% on the effect, and on a radius of 5.3 pixels. But for each retouch, contour sharpness is different! Photos are different in quality. I also use other methods for sharpening, but they are more complicated.

11. Levels again, with the alt key pressed, first move the black slider so that there is a black dot on the face, for example, on the pupils, on the upper eyelids, somewhere, maybe on the hair. And then with the alt key pressed, move the white slider so that there is a small white dot on the face. This is for maximum contrast. If some part of the face is lightened or darkened again, use the vector mask again, merge the layers. Let it be long, but the result will be!

12. We work with pens. First - the eyes, then the nose, mouth, wrinkles. Darkener, finger, brightener, mix brush, constantly compare with the original.

You can draw eyes or other facial features, so as not to be mistaken in this way: duplicate the original layer, sharpen it. Intermediate layers are disabled. And the top layer we are working on is turned on, make it opaque to the smallest percentage and draw on the top layer.

Just make sure it's not too dark or too light. If it's overkill, brightener or dimmer, do less by percentage, and cancel the action. And be careful: the clarifier can be both in highlights, and in midtones, and in shadows. The same with the dimmer. And they act differently! If you have left the original, you can try to make your retouching 50% (approximate number) opaque, leaving the source as the bottom layer, merge the layers. But then again you have to remove the noise and sharpen. But it will be more similar! You can not overdo it with the stroke. The lower eyelids should not be as black as the upper ones. Look carefully where the darkest places in the photo are, highlight them more, and where there is less blackness, circle there, but not so much. At the end, contour sharpening again. Sometimes, after sharpening, white stripes remain around the wings of the nose, on the eyelids. You can remove them with a mix brush at high magnification, or take a dimmer with backlight settings, a very small exposure.

On the face there should not be as sharp transitions from dark to light. The darkest places in the grayscale mode up to 50-60%, the blackness on the stone will be higher. How to see? Window - check the box next to info. We look at the upper left corner in the main working environment, K values. But don't forget the grayscale mode.

13 Hair. We didn’t worry about the hair during retouching at all, and now we don’t understand what it is! I select the hair on the source, duplicate it on a new layer, which I put at the very top and now I do whatever I want with the hair. Levels, sharpness, finger, clarifier, dimmer. If you don't like it, I'll delete it. I highlight the lightest hair with a highlighter. Where the blackness is completely and the hair is practically invisible, I draw the hair with the "shadow" clarifier in the settings at the top with a small exposure. I smooth it with a mix brush so that there are no bumps. And then where it seems to me that they are closest, I brighten the backlight with a clarifier. The blackness is not painted over, and the hair acquires volume. Sometimes in a good photo it is not necessary to highlight the hair, it becomes expressive from sharpness. I wiped the edges where necessary with an eraser. At the end I combine with retouching.

14. Put on clothes, painted the background. With the background - a separate lesson. But in the same place, no one needs difficulties! And I like it more difficult, more interesting! But if anyone wishes how to make the background perfectly black and so that there are no gray spots around, which we sometimes do not see, but only the machine sees, I can give the following lesson. When a black background is made, the hair can get lost in that background. I take the highlight setting dodger, a small exposure and paint over the edges of the hair. Separate hairs on top, so that the hairstyle is not so smoothed, I draw 100% with the smallest finger, with one. If they stand out strongly, then you can darken a little with a dimmer.

15 There is a program that is for the Step machine. On it you can check any retouching, how it will look on the stone. Sometimes it happens, I'll do everything as soon as I upload it to the program - horror! I can already see where I need to highlight, where to darken. Where the hair or clothes will merge with the background, where there are light spots on the skin of the face that need to be removed. In this program, there should be both black and the whitest point, as well as gray tones. But if there are large white spots all over the face, then there will definitely be a pancake on the stone! I can by e-mail throw off this program to everyone who wants it. It’s not difficult for me. It’s easy to use it, but it’s a little buggy on the computer without a machine, so you need to press ok all the time. And upload images there only in BMP format.

If something is not clear, it doesn’t work, please contact me, I will answer all your questions with pleasure! Do not be afraid to seem ridiculous, I created this lesson specifically for beginners, I myself began to master Photoshop five months ago. Puzzled, where to start, where to look for lessons? And if at least one person uses one of my methods in retouching, we can already say that life has not been lived in vain!!! Kidding.

Retouching on monuments

high quality engraving

Retouching a photo on a monument allows you to make a high-quality portrait for engraving. Each photo ordered in our company is retouched without fail. This makes it possible to improve image quality, remove minor defects that are present, first of all, in old photographs, and prepare a portrait of the deceased for engraving equipment.

Retouching on monuments is carried out only by professional artists, taking into account the features of our equipment. We prepare not only photo retouching for engraving, but also for transferring photos to ceramics or glass.

Retouching a portrait on a monument allows you to add clarity to the facial features of the deceased, smooth out defects, and makes the image suitable for engraving on laser machine. A simple, raw, digital photo or digitized photo will be fuzzy when laser engraved. Therefore, photo retouching for monuments is the first and obligatory stage of transferring a portrait to stone.

Photo processing for laser engraving on a monument consists of several stages: converting the photo to digital format, cropping, retouching

Portrait retouching for engraving begins with the transition of the photo to digital format (if the photo is paper). This is done by scanning the original photo at high resolution (600 - 1200 dpi).

During cropping, the desired size of the future image is selected. The size of the photo depends on the size of the monument. Standard sizes- 25x30, 30x40. Then the background of the photograph is removed, creating a kind of monochromatic “substrate”.

Photo retouching for monuments has a number of advantages:

enhancing the clarity of the overall image and facial features: drawing hair, eyes, drawing “cut” parts
drawing clothes or replacing with clothes from our catalog
recovery and correction of damaged photos

Ready retouching is superimposed on the sketch of the monument and sent to all clients free of charge. In this way, you will be able to see the layout of the selected model and how the portrait retouching looks on the monument.

The loss of a loved one is always a great grief. Of course, relatives will forever remain in our memory, but over time, their image tends to fade. Therefore, it is customary to place a photograph on the monument.
In order for the image to be clear and well convey not only the appearance, but also the character of the deceased, the photo must be processed with high quality.

Therefore, we offer you photo retouching for the monument.

Experience and professionalism

Our online studio employs not ordinary photoshoppers, but professional photo artists and designers. So, turning to us, you can be sure that a real specialist will be engaged in the restoration of your photo. No matter how “problematic” or damaged the image is, in 9 cases out of 10 we can restore it and adapt it for:

engravings;
photoceramics;
printing on glass;
large-format printing for funerals, commemorations or keepsakes;
restoration of photographs of faded medallions.

How much does it cost to retouch a photo for a monument?

We have the following prices.

We will be able to name the exact cost of the work only after we see the photos and get acquainted with your wishes. Send the image to the master for evaluation right now - it's free and does not oblige you to anything.

In what form should I send a photo for retouching?

If the image is paper, it can be scanned using a home scanner or in any photo salon.

We work remotely, via the Internet, so we cannot help you with scanning and printing pictures.

The result of our work directly depends on the quality of the image. Therefore, when choosing a photo, we strongly advise you to follow these rules:

Scanning resolution is strictly within 300-400 dpi.
The scan mode is color only, even if the image itself is black and white.
Use the manual mode of the scanner. Do not apply any filters provided by the scanner driver - sharpening, color restoration, descreening, etc.
If the image has embossing, scan it 2 times, rotating it 180 degrees on the second scan. Both scans must be sent.
The size of the scanned image is at least 20x30cm.
After scanning is complete, save the photo as a jpg file.
The scan is complete, you can send the picture to us.