Tutorial: AKVIS Retoucher

Restoration of a daguerreotype

The photo has been sent to us by Oleg Rakhimov. It is a daguerreotype of his relative made in 1893.

The daguerreotype looks quite well, that's why our restoration job will not require much effort: we will remove a few scratches and reconstruct the worn out corners of the photo.

• Open the photo in Adobe Photoshop.
• Before we call the image restoration plug-in AKVIS Retoucher, we should select the damaged areas. First, we scale the image to be able to select small areas.
• Press the button Edit in Quick Mask in the Toolbar to switch to the Quick mask mode.
  
• Activate the Pencil tool in the Toolbar.
  
• Start to paint over the scratches and the torn corners of the photo.
  

  The selected defects will be highlighted in semitransparent red, if you haven't changed the default settings in the Quick Mask Options window. To open this window, double-click on the Quick mask button in the Toolbar.

  
• When all the defects are painted over, the photo will look like that:
  

  We press the button Edit in Standard Mode.

  
• After you have switched to the Standard mode, you will see that the red semitransparent mask turned into a selection. However, it is not the defects that will be selected, but the undamaged parts of the image. Therefore, we should inverse the selection, which is done with the key combination Shift+Ctrl+I or with the command Select - Inverse.
  
• Now, when all defects are selected, you can call the plug-in AKVIS Retoucher. For this purpose select the command Filter - AKVIS - Retoucher. You will see the plug-in window with the defects highlighted in red again.
  
• Press the button to start the restoration process and see the damaged areas disappearing giving place to restored fragments.
  
• When the restoration process is over and there are no red areas left, press the button to apply the result to the image.