Interesting topic, Mike.
I’m in two - no, several - minds. On the one hand, as a learner I’d like to see a bit more explanation by restorers as to how they achieve certain results on difficult/unusual jobs; and I’d like to see this attached to the work itself so we that can see what we’re talking about. On the other hand - as you say - different people work differently. Some people like to discuss their work, others don’t wish to do so or feel uncomfortable doing so. And on the third hand, if we went too far in discussing stuff - attached to a contributor’s post - we might scare off potential new posts - a bit like surgeons discussing the details of the cuts in the presence of the patient.
Actually, I think what you have been doing occasionally is great - brief descriptions of your methods/problems with some restores.
Anyway, a few thoughts:
Last night (Australian time) I finally finished a restore (the Portuguese soldier) on my third attempt, after two false starts and after giving up but then starting again a few days later.
What was different the third time is a bit of a story; I’ll try to keep it brief.
Backing up a step, another job I spent a lot of time on recently was the wedding one with all the stripes. While doing it I read briefly about Fourier Transforms for removing lines, and dafydd said that they’d used it on that photo, and you (Mike) later said you were trying it out. I started looking in earnest for one for Macs. I found two sources. But one of those - for plugins (“joofa”) - was no longer providing them. I ended up downloading a copy of the other, a stand alone program called ImageJ. I tried this out on the photo in question and it did work to some extent but not really well enough for me to spend a lot more time on it to clean up the remainder. I presume that because the original photo had fading as well as lines that were variable - those two things in conjunction - the FFT processing couldn’t clean up all the lines. (I think I followed the instructions properly.)
I’d also read somewhere that GIMP had a Destripe filter which I thought I’d like to try out if ImageJ didn’t do the job. (And I do like comparing the features of different programs to decide which one is best for me - e.g. family tree programs! And when they’re free… SWMBO doesn’t object.) So I downloaded it and after working out how to drive it, I tried it out on the photo. No good. Much poorer results than the FFT. I suspect it may be good on straightforward stripes.
But now I had GIMP. So I gave it a go on the Portuguese photo. And I started getting better results. Not because GIMP is better than PSE, but because, completely new to GIMP, I had to go very slowly indeed. GIMP is different. It has a clunkier interface than Photoshop Elements, but - to a newbie anyway - it has more subtlety (is that the right word?) in some of its tools. (Disclaimer: I’m so new to both programs I probably don’t know which tools each one has compared with the other - I just haven’t found/used them yet. They definitely operate differently, anyway.)
I didn’t complete the restore solely using GIMP. I kept swapping between the two programs. I could do some things more easily/better in one, some things in the other. I won’t detail the pros and cons of each here because I’m being longwinded enough already and because with my limited experience - 2 months with PSE and one week with GIMP - whatever I said now would most likely turn out to be complete rubbish. Maybe I’ll do a comparison when I’ve had (a lot) more experience.
Cheers, Peter.