Cleaning Colour scan challenge - Glare and gradients

[Orthio]

Hey all,

I just started on cleaning this page and made a bit of headway but it looks like it might be worth grabbing some advice before I plow time into this. Do any of you have experience in dealing with glare and gradients on colour scans? Any tips?

The image as it stands looks like this:

Spoiler

And I've gotten it to this so far (kind of testing for now):

Spoiler

The full file (3000 pixel height, 300dpi, hopefully works) can be found here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ua65dtzs00kggzd/SO_v01_008-009.jpg

I'm gonna start working on other things and then come back to this later. If any of you have any experience in this kind of clean please let me know!

Thanks,
Orthio

 

[Gradonil_Ral]

Clone/stamp, healing brush and content-aware fill are all you can use for pages you haven't denoised first.

My advice: Leave the glares for the end, choose your source and anchor points better. Draw different things on separate layers - makes them easier to adjust.
Even if you copy a glare from a dark background onto a light one, if you have it on a separate layer you can erase stuff around it and, to make it look more natural, use a soft selection to erase its edges.
You can also make your own glares. Especially if you have a tablet (way easier to make with pen pressure).

 

[Orthio]

Found some time to work on this again, gotten the page to this for now:

Spoiler

That healing brush is an absolute god-send, really does help on the glare gradients, I found myself using a lot of masks to stop it from dribbling all over the rest of the page but otherwise - perfic! Tried the content-aware fill but the page is way too messy for it to pick up on anything, the way it demos makes it look like complete magic so I'll keep an eye out for areas to try it for sure, tbh I barely use any of the features of newer cs, I properly miss out.

I've tried making my own glares before actually, one of the inbuilt brushes looks like a star and if you just need something basic, layering a few of those on top of each other looks passable.

I'll have to jump onto this more later but the healing brush definitely did the job so cheers for that.