Cleaned up CMYK tritone

The goal of this exam is to take a badly damaged grayscale photo and make it into a professional CMYK tritone.

Here's the damaged photo:

Click on the picture or link to download the high-quality JPEG at 300 dpi (300K).

There are obviously some severe problems.

Some can be taken care of with the Hiistory brush and some with the rubber stamp. Most will be eliminated with a nice tight crop. That will be your first step.

The second step can be done in many ways.

The procedure used by the author was to convert the scan to CMYK; Select All; fill magenta and yellow channels with white; cut the cyan channel to the clipboard (leaving white); convert to grayscale and add a new layer. Then paste the copied cyan information into the new layer and blend it in Multiply mode until it looks something like what you see at left.

Next we need to apply the History brush technique you learned in the Dirty Roses tutorial. You know the routine: blur, new snapshot and paint in the history using Darken and Lighten modes. As you can see to the right, there is still a lot of damage that has not been dealt with.

Now you will have to go to the Rubber Stamp to clone out most of the rest of the damage. You will have to work carefully, stitching back and forth over the damage to bring both sides in to fill the breaks.

This will be tedious work, but you should be able to arrive rather quickly at an image that looks much like what you see to the left. You will have to fix the tiny little cracks (probably with the blur tool). Notice how many there are. Old photos often take many hours to touch up.

Portrait tips

To make portraits look good, you can keep everything relativly blurry (people do not like to look at the grunge on their skin, for example). BUT! The eyes and mouth need to be sharp!

Making the tritone

Now you need to add some color to make this fit into your full-color CMYK booklet. The problem with leaving this as a halftone in that environment is that black alone looks very weak when compared to CMYK separations and graphics.

If we can convert the grapyscale image into a tritone or quadritone we will greatly expand the maximum density when printed for .9 Dmax (a 70% gray) to a dMax over 3 (which can produce a 90% to 95% gray.

You must save to grayscale first

Once the file is saved in Grayscale, notice that the type option becomes available. This allows you to produce monotones (1 color), duotones (2 spot colors), tritone (3 spot colors), & quadritone (4 spot colors).

Click on the Load button and find the Photoshop application folder.

You are looking for the Presets folder. Find the Folder named Duotones or Duotone Presets. In that folder you will find folders for Duotones, Tritones, and Quadritones. Open Tritones, then open Process Tritones and pick a dark brown preset -- click OK.

Adjust it to make it as you like it. We talk about that a lot in other tutorials. when you are done, convert your Tritone to CMYK; Save your final result as a JPEG; and attach it to an email sent to your instructor.