Photos of damaged paintings - how to make the damage disappear in photoshop

While all of the above suggestions might work - my urgent advice would be to first of all change the lighting.

This very steep lighting angle will bring out every last defect to maximum effect. This "skimming" light (known as raking light) is used in conservation precisely for that purpose.

For a "simulated repair", the best approach is probably to bounce the light off white walls/ceilings. This gives a very soft light with minimal shadows. The angle to the lights should be around 45 degrees. I might even do two or three exposures with light to different directions, and then use Lighten blend mode in the layer stack.

I’ve dealt with damaged photos before. Sometimes, even with Photoshop, the really bad spots just won’t fix themselves. One thing that helped me was using a small repair tool to recover what’s actually still in the file..like pulling thumbnails or rebuilding parts of the image before doing any detailed retouching. It doesn’t fix everything, but it saved me a ton of time on the worst ones.

Have you thought about trying something like that on just a couple of your worst images first to see if it helps?

Outstanding images- we tent to get alot of blurry images taken with phones.

Generative Fill seemed to work OK if I repaired small sections, and it has the advantage of letting you choose variations. But if speed is a priority if you have to do a lot of these, have you tried the Remove tool? It seemed to work well enough repairing small areas where paint appeared to have flaked off, as in the demo below. Is this the type of damage you’re trying to repair, and have you been able to get results like those shown below?

Although Photoshop has several tools that can can quickly retouch photos, for an image like this with a distinct hand-painted style I think the Remove tool (which can use AI) might match up the surroundings more easily.

If you’ve had issues like the AI inserting random new birds, maybe change how an area is being selected. I’m not a generative AI expert, but I’ve seen YouTube videos where some have tips on how to better guide the generative AI tools. For example, there seem to be cases where selecting too little (e.g. not including an object’s shadow) or too much produces unwanted results or new objects. As you can see above, I try to paint the Remove tool over the flaked-off parts without including too much more.

Another Remove tool tip is that if the first attempt doesn’t quite do the kind of repair you wanted, it’s OK to paint over it again; the Remove tool will generate something slightly different in case that works better.

I would use frequency separation. That splits your image into the fine textures (high frequency) and the general colours and tones (low frequency) allowing you to work on each separately. To set this up :

1. Make 2 duplicates of your image layer

Name the lower - "Low frequency"

Name the Higher - "High Frequency"

2. Select the Low frequency layer and use Filter Gaussian Blur (around 6.0)

3. Select the High frequency layer
Go to menu Image > Apply Image
Set the source layer to Low Frequency
Set the blending mode to Subtract
Set Scale to 2 *
Set offset to 128 *
Click OK

4. Change the blending mode of the high frequency layer to Linear Light

5. Now you can clone out the harsh edges of flaked paint on the high frequency layer and restore the colour on the low frequency frequency layer. Remember to set the source for cloning and brush sampling to current layer when working on those separate layers.





* Note - the above steps are for 8 bit/channel images. For 16 bit/channel step 3 changes slightly

3. Select the High frequency layer
Go to menu Image > Apply Image
Set the source layer to Low Frequency
Check "Invert" next to channel

Set the blending mode to Add
Set Scale to 2
Set Offset to 0
Click OK

Now carry on with step 4 above

A very quick and dirty example using that technique is below (it deserves much more time and care than this). I mainly cloned on the high frequency layer and brushed with a soft brush on the low frequency layer.

I hope that gets you started.

Dave

Catherine, your best chance at getting advice is to post a photo. It's a tedious and sometimes tricky task, involving several ways to fix a photo -- cloning (copying a similar, undamaged area, then pasting the borrowed part over the damage), and using a few seemingly magic tools like Healing brush. Also, you can search for tutorials about photo editing on the web. I'll look for a few to get you initiated into the art of photo repair.

A search of Adobe.com:

Retouch and repair photos

An auto-generated Adobe suggestion

[Generative AI overviews are experimental. Quality may vary. Overviews are not your Content] --