Vectronix 2/VECTRONIX2.iso/FILES_01/DAS_REPR.LZH/RETCH2.TXT

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Last summer, Retouche Professional, provided a
sad highlight to my computer using days. I had
brought a .TIF file to a service bureau to be printed at
2400 DPI. This was a photographic collage of three
children in various poses, superimposed on a back-
ground of greek ruins. The photo gave the impression
that there were a dozen individuals, not just three.
This was my first serious work with Retouche, but
even as a first effort it looked impressive. The service
bureau owner agreed with this judgement and demon-
strated this agreement in a most painful way. He called
in the co-renter of their studio. This man, Howard, is
a professional photographer. He spends hours, days,
months, manipulating his creations in his darkroom,
to create special effects. An elderly gent, he struck me
as a fairly interesting person. George, the service bu-
reau owner, started off the resulting conversation by
praising Howards work. ½Yes Howard is a great pho-
tographer, hey Howard why don't you show Dave some
of your creations?"
Apparently Howard is the shy type but, this kind
of encouragement was hard to resist. He went back to
his half of the studio and retrieved a number of his
photo's. I worked through them. Howard, is indeed, a
good photographer. What I didn't realize is that there
is, what could be called, bad blood or friendly animos-
ity between these two guys. After giving Howard
enough rope, so to speak, George than handed him the
lino output of my collage. At this point, the output was
a 12 by 19 photograph. It looked stunning. George
turned to Howard, ½took him all of two hours to cre-
ate on his computer, what do you think Howard?"
Howard's response was to break into tears. After he
left, and he left for the day. George explained that
Howard was electronics illiterate, that learning the
computer was the equivalent of reconstructing the
great pyramids of Egypt by hand. George had been
telling him, in an extremely friendly, good hearted
way, that he was doomed, his darkroom equipment
was antiquarian and either suicide or learning a new
trade, like garbage collection, were his best options. I
left to the sound of intermittent chuckling from
George, whose day had been made. Indeed so pleased
was George that he didn't charge me for the printout. I
can appreciate a little good natured humor but... oh
well. Howard's gonna have to change.
The Computer Darkroom
Now the truth is that photo-manipulation software
does not eliminate the skill of photography. You still
have to have good images to work from in the first
place. But the computer will indeed, if it already
hasn't, doom the conventional darkroom. Effects that
would take a conventional darkroom hours will take
seconds on the computer. Plus there a number of
things the conventional darkroom simply cannot do at
all. Last month I introduced Retouche Professional
Black and White. This month I'm going to demon-
strate some of these capabilities. First, a little word of
caution. A week ago I received Retouche CD. This is
the color version of Retouche. I reported that Retouche
did not need a graphics card. Such is not the case with Retouche CD. While you don't need a separate monitor
to run either program, you do need a graphics card to
use the color capabilities of Retouche CD. This was a
joke in poor taste, as far as I'm concerned. It means I
must run out and purchase a graphics card. This is
something I've been meaning to do, but now I'm
forced into it. This card will not arrive until the end of
October. This is because my dog foolishly blew his
trust fund on rubber squeaky toys, so a detailed de-
scription of Retouche CD will have to wait. At the
same time, the American distributor of Retouche,
informs me that the program will run on the Falcon.
To rub salt into my wounds, he also tells me that the
Falcon will need no graphics card, unless you want to
use the two monitor option.
Other news, without going into specifics, is that a
number of other photo-manipulation programs will
soon be released. But that's the future. Retouche is out
now and I haven't seen, let alone used these other
programs.
Keep in mind that the author is assuming that
everyone read last months description of Retouche, and hopefully has it available to refer back to.

Manipulating Photo's
The following is a description of how I restored a
number of photo's. This is not meant as a primer, but
rather I want to provide a ½feel¬ for the process. This
information cannot be absorbed unless the program is
on your computer, but it does show what can be done.
Toward the end of the article is a summary on
manipulating levels of color.
The first demonstration, shown in figure one, is a
1932 demonstration in favor of unemployment insur-
ance. My father, as well as participating, took the
photo. This image has seen better days. If my father
hadn't told me what it was, I would have assumed that
it was an early Macy's Thanksgiving parade. Figure 1a
shows the original photo. (All images used for these
demonstrations are 150 dpi .TIF files.) First I used the
contrast control to straiten out what was dark and what
was light. Essentially this acts to increase light and
dark between neighboring pixels. The result is figure
1b. So far so good, but everything is still blurry. For
figure 1c I used the ½sharpen" special effect at maxi-
mum size and power. This cleared up the faces. The
sharpening effect works much like the contrast con-
trol, but grabs chunks of pixels and heightens contrast
between these groups. There are a number of choices,
small groups, medium groups or relatively large
groups. Within these choices you can also set the
power and what colors are affected. The nice thing
about all this is the undo buffer, which works with all
aspects of Retouche. If you're not happy with the par-
ticular effect, undo it and try another setting. This, as
well as other effects, can be speeded up by using the
block function to rubber band a small area and just
try your effect within the block. In other words you
can take seconds to find out what will work.
At any rate, the sharpening tool did its job. It un-
fortunately has a side effect of sometimes leaving
½holes" in the picture. These are not shown because I
immediately used the ½soften" effect, which, lowers
contrast between groups of pixels. I used soften at a
very low power. Just enough to get rid of the holes.
Figure 1c is the result. Finally I noticed that this photo
had been brutally tortured and beaten. There were
scratches, washed out areas, where the image was gone
completely. Until I got to figure 1c, I didn't even real-
ize these problems existed. I then selected the duplicat-
ing pencil. By positioning the duplicating pencil next
to an intact window, that area was now stored. I would
take the duplicating pencil to the damaged section of
the image and paint in the window, or paint in the
brick, or whatever. The result is figure 1d. If anyone
wants an archive of old lefty's, bringing forth the so-
cial benefits, we take for granted, this is one of them.
This entire process from scanning to printing took 30
minutes. Don't even try to guess how long
it would take with a darkroom.
   Let's do an easy one. In figure 2a, we
have a relatively well preserved but ex-
tremely faded image from 1928. This a
photo of my mother at the age of 18 (on the
right) and two friends. The only thing we
really have to do here is darken the image.
Using the block function I copy the image
to a new frame, but using the block con-
trols, I specify that I want the copy to be 70
percent. I then overlay the original image
onto my 70 percent copy and the photo is
restored. I then made a sleight adjustment to
the contrast. Finally I masked the faces of
the three friends, inverted the mask and
then sharpened just the faces, using a very
low power. (More on masks later on.) That's
it, figure 2b. This took five minutes. Special
effects take place on the image. But the
above actions took place by copying the im-
age and then adding or subtracting to the new image.
The results can be impressive.

The Grid
   In figure 3 I'm going to demonstrate another effect
of Retouche. This block function has a lot of possibili-
ties. One of the more extreme is the grid. The copies
used by the block function can be rotated in one de-
gree steps or twisted. You can make people narrow or
wide but the grid. Well the grid is a frame consisting
of either 9 or 16 control points. These points can be in-
dividually moved and when your image is copied onto
the grid, the image follows these new patterns. Thus
in figure 3a my brother, a social worker in Louisville
Kentucky, is converted into figure 3b, ½Bubba Barkin."
While I stretched all the control points, I mainly ex-
panded the center six points, only stretching the top
and bottom points enough to avoid making the figure
look impossible. I would also like to say that my poor
manipulated brother does not follow computers and
while I send him most of my articles, from time to
time, some of them get lost in the mail. As an aside, I
should mention that Retouche saves its files as .TIH
files. This is a modified .TIF file, which loads and
saves much faster than regular .TIF files. Retouche can
also import and export compressed or uncompressed
.TIF files. When doing a long work session the advan-
tage of these .TIH files becomes obvious. When bring-
ing files to a service bureau the files should be saved
in the .TIF format.

Masking
At this point it's time to discuss the masking fea-
tures of Retouche. This feature represents a consider-
able part of the programs power. Masks are used to
cover portions of the image. These are literally masks.
They are in no way part of the image. So if I cover a
persons head with a mask, the face is still there, under
the mask, and is completely unaffected by the mask.
In figure two, I masked the faces of the three friends,
inverted the mask, so that only the faces were un-
masked, and sharpened the image. In this case only the faces were affected by the sharpening effect. The
mask acts to protect those portions of the image
which are masked. I can save these masks as .IMG
files. Thus, when I work on a photo, which will be
used over and over again, I save the mask with the
TIF file.
At any rate this is one use of the mask function.
Another is in the creation of photographic collage. Us-
ing the photo of Bubba Barkin, I mask the back-
ground. In another window I have my favorite lions. I
can now use the copy function to insert Bubba into the
photo of the lions, without the white background cov-
ering part of the image. I can take this one step fur-
ther and mask part of the lions and insert Bubba be-
hind the lions. After creating a collage, I use the vari-
ous anti-aliasing tools to smooth out whatever discrep-
ancies there are in the new photo. The result is seen in
figure 3d.
   At this point one might ask, ½just how is this wise
guy creating these masks?" The masking tool is just a
cross hair. In TT Medium it produces a red overlay, in
ST High, the mask is black. This means you will often
have to reduce the contrast in order to see the mask.
You can only choose between different sizes for the re-
sulting mask: one pixel, 4 pixels, 12, 24, 48, 81. You
can draw freehand, draw using straight lines, or you
can use four point bezier curves. It's also possible to
use the vector part of Retouche to enclose an entire
area and then the mask will appear following the vec-
tor curve. Once an area is surrounded by the outline
of a mask, there is a fill option. If there is enough dif-
ference between the part of the image that you wish
to mask and the background, Retouche has the ability
to measure this difference and automatically mask the
colors that you define. Very, very handy. But even go-
ing over a 1.4 meg file piece by piece takes very little
time. Remember you are not affecting the underlying
image. Mistakes cause no damage. You can save the
mask at various points in its creation for different
functions. The whole process, can be considered as
work, but relatively easy. If it's hard to tell where your
image and background separate, you can use the vari-
ous contrast tools to heighten the difference and after
the mask is created restore the original contrast.
Another interesting aspect of masks is the ability
to add masks to other masks. You can set and control
various parameters so that masks will replace or join
existing masks in various ways. When a collage be-
comes complicated enough, this automates the con-
struction of them. Once a photo is masked, you don't
have to laboriously recreate a new mask for the col-
lage, just add on the old one. You can create unlimited
collages, especially if your clever and save files of eve-
rything. In figure four, is an example of a collage used
in a City Council race in New York. This collage con-
sists of 16 separate photo's. In photo restoration, where
an image is ½washed"  out, you can mask this washed
out area, invert the mask and then copy the entire file
to a new window, specifying, let us say, 50 percent.
You can then turn off the mask, and add the entire
image to your 50 percent image. The washed out area
will now have the same level of color as the undam-
aged portion of your photo. This process is rarely that
simple. There are degree's of damage, but you get the
idea. Anything is possible.

The Mechanics of Color
Hopefully, everyone is enjoying this article, but no
description of how a handful of photo's are manipu-
lated is going to provide the key to understanding the
principals of photo-manipulation. Let's take the opera-
tions of figure two. Much of what I accomplished in
this example could have been accomplished simply by
making the scan darker. The faded photo contained
colors of very low levels of gray. If the setting on the
scanner had been set to compensate for this, I could
have achieved much the same results. Superficially fig-
ure one looks much the same, but such is not the case.
The marching figures of the demonstrators were a
mass of very similar levels of gray, similar but not
identical. Moreover these figures were over 50 percent
gray. Just using Retouche, to simply add copies of the
photo together,  would have resulted in much of the
photo becoming 100 percent black. The same problem
would have occurred if I had scanned the photo in at a
darker setting. This is not a good solution.  Instead, by
using the contrast controls of Retouche, we are separat-
ing levels of gray which had very close gray values. By
doing this, our figures become distinct. If I had
worked with a darker image it would be impossible to
separate 100 percent from 100 percent. I've tried to get
around this by writing to president Clinton urging
him to repeal some of the laws of reality, but as of  yet
this has proved futile.
In other words, we need tools to manipulate these
levels of color, and photo-manipulation programs pro-
vide these tools. The expertise comes from an  unders-
tanding of the elements which we are working with. In
the above examples we are separating the very close
levels of gray by changing the contrast of neighboring
pixels. The other main operation involves changing
the contrast between groups of pixels, the sharpening
tools. Retouche provides an incredible degree of con-
trol over these kinds of changes. The primary opera-
tions involved in figure two are those of redefining
the levels of gray and the way these levels mix.
Figure two is aimed at the lazar printer for final
output. If you notice many of the trees in the back-
ground appear black or near black. If I had been doing
this restoration for a client, who wanted perfection,
and the final result would be a photographic negative,
then the process would have been dif-
ferent. I would have used the masking
tool to cover and protect the higher lev-
els of gray. My copies would have in-
volved small changes of five percent
increases. I would then remask the
higher levels of gray. I would do this
because some of the lower levels would
have risen in value to the point where
copying them would cause the picture
to become black. This whole proce-
dure is aimed at avoiding the creation
of distinct bands of color. Everything
has to merge, as in fact a quality photo
merges. Retouche offers additional
tools, that I haven't even discussed, to
aid in this.
   It is by understanding these manipu-
lations that we can do more then just
act on a trial and error basis. A back-
handed complaint against Retouche, is
that the program is so easy and power-
ful, that it's possible to do serious work
just punching the keyboard. In the
Atari world we are used to working
with monochrome files. The bolding
feature of a program like Touch-Up,
simply increase the size of the existing
black dots. This has no relation to true
photo manipulation. As I've said, here
we are working not with dots, but with
levels of color. The size of the pixels does not change!
Only the level of color changes. I'm not writing this to
tell people what cannot be done, If the digital data is in
the photo, this program can bring it out.

Unlimited Possibilities
   There are unlimited possibilities to using this pro-
gram. I haven't even gone into using the graduated fill
options, which create and alter shadows, or change the
lighting effects of photo's. There are numerous other
effects. Contouring, roughening, adding structure.
Adding structure, depending on how you set the pa-
rameters, can turn your photo's into paintings. Hey, all
this stuff is so exciting, and opens up such powerful
potentials, I can barely bring myself to stop writing. Retouche comes with a number of accessories. One al-
lows the adding of text to your files. Another allows
exporting as Postscript files. One accessory allows for
the creation of pre-screening for final output. Owners
of Calamus SL or Didot can do this final screening
from within their programs. There are a number of
other accessory programs.
   Next month article is up in the air, depending on
developments, but will probably deal with combining
the output of Calamus SL and Retouche and lugging
your stuff down to the service bureau. Until then.